This is stumping me. I have a project that drops every signal routed to a bus by 6db. If I route everything to the master bus, the output will never reach above -6db. If I route everything to stem buses, and each stem routed to the master, the output will never get above -12db. How can I fix this, and what is causing it? Thanks for the help.

Oh, fantastic... the buses are all screwed up when I try to do any automation now too. Man, this is awesome!!

You've got some unusual behavior going on, for sure.
For anyone to be able to help you, we will need to know something about what you are working with.
Which Sonar version?
What is your OS?
What effects, limiters, compressors, etc., do you have in your busses or tracks.
Is it just this one project?
Have you experienced this before?
Have you made any changes to your system? MS updates, new plug-ins, anything?
Have you tried rebooting the computer?
Do you turn the computer off, or let it go into sleep mode when you are not using it?
Sleep mode, especially with XP, can lead to some unpredictable behavior.
Give us something to work with, and someone may have an answer.

The first, most obvious thing to check is that all of your busses and mains have their faders set to 0dB and also the input gain/trim on each buss.

You know how sometimes you can stare right at a problem and not see it? Often, posting a screenshot is all it takes for someone else to spot it.

Posting from work now (shhh!) - I can assure you the obvious fader/limiter/compressor questions can be dismissed. The master fader, and most of the bus faders are at 0, and the only compressors used were on FX buses. When I was testing the -6db phenomenon, I routed to buses with no plugins on them, all faders up.

I did have the workstation on for at least three days, and yes, it does go into Sleep Mode. I thought a reboot was in order, but was irritated enough to simply turn it off and come back another day. It would be nice if that were the core problem, but I'm not getting my hopes up, since this was apparent in the begininning of the project (a few days ago), and I often let this workstation stay on for days and drop in and out of sleep mode with no issues before. Who knows, when I get home, maybe it'll be cured when I boot it up. I did work with other projects over the past couple of days, and this issue was not present.

bitflipper, I will do so when I get home.

Thanks for the responses so far guys!

Sooo... what's the current record for the Longest Time It Took To Open A Project so I know when to give up on this? 10 minutes and counting... (sh**)

Also... why can't I see to post paragraphs without them being shoved into a single paragraph? I seriously need to switch DAWs!

***UPDATE***
Message boards are out of date or otherwise have glitches with Firefox. Downloaded Google Chrome, and some of the bugs are fixed.

Good idea! 

  Cute.

***UPDATE ***
Since there is no image uploader on here that I can find, I've posted my screenshot elsewhere. Let's see if it will link up...



Here is the console view isolated...


And for a larger version of that:   http://tinypic.com/r/afbx9c/6