Wow, thank you all for so many good suggestions! First of all, it's definitely encouraging to see that it must get easier to deal with Sonar over time. And suggestions about Ctrl-N, or using date for project name are very good ones. I'll also look into some of the books/vids mentioned.
I spent some more time with it, playing with the suggestions, and managed to set up my default template to suit my style, and closed everything, and started again from scratch, and was up & recording very quickly! I've had a very hard time in the past trying to get the metronome to pipe to master output (don't know why they didn't do this by default), or trying to tie the midi input to a particular synth. But somehow I seem to have it all working & saved in the template now. So, I'm definitely inspired now to spend more time with Sonar!
Thanks again, Matt