Got it thanks, bit different to Sonar 7 I've switched from!
So I've just had a small section of audio in one track cut into small clips, external insert plugin going to the desk then back into soundcard. Nothing actually patched into the desk insert but its doing DA AD round trip. Did this 10 times and every time its been bang on to the sample. 5 times I selected the track by clicking the track number, 5 times by dragging across the track to select all clips. Was this what you meant by selecting the clips?
Now this is a very basic setup with nothing else going on, but it seems to work for me, definitely leagues better than Sonar 7 and even X1 when I demoed it! How often is it going wrong, and when it does can you work out how many samples it is off?
For my setup I haven't changed the audio settings yet, so using ASIO reported latency of 832 samples, no manual offset. Oddly my ping time through external insert is less than the ASIO reported latency - 708 samples where you say it should be bigger. Could this be to do with the buffer not being reported that you mentioned?