Wavosaur should preserve the audio quality just fine. Another popular freebie is Audacity. These free editors lack some of the more sophisticated features of commercial products like Goldwave and Sound Forge, but for basic editing tasks they work just fine and are capable of producing a finished product of comparable quality to SONAR.

 Stienberg takes no chances with Piracy so they limit the free samples. 
Once you are a customer you can free trial other products. 
Wave lab is a cut above all those free versions. I have tried Audacity and its like going back to 1986 for me. 
I have used Sound Forge (LE?) that came with a friends USB turntable and it seemed closer to wave lab. 
So I'm afraid you would just have to spring for the $100. 

I'll go ahead and order the USB key and use the trial version of wave lab and see how it works out.

I usually bounce to tracks to apply effects. Mostly cuz the fx are on buses.

The bounce to tracks dialog provides a way to disable lots of uneeded functions.

I sorta remember reading that even if there are no instances of a function the function still is attempting to do it. So, no buss automation, disable bus automation.

And: I always add the track and name it before the bounce.  This names the clip accordingly.

But: my experience these past 10 years is the only way to go faster is to have a faster processor.