Loved the first third and the last third: I didn't feel the arabic(?) scale part in the middle worked though, musically or sonically (the solo synth didn't gel to me). But the rest was absolutely beautiful.
FLAC is lossless unlike mp3. But IMHO, storage is cheap vs. CPU cycles ("every little helps", to coin a phrase), so I'd argue conversion to an immediately usable format (wav for us) makes sense.
Also, if you have a plug-in that can do this (Sound Forge used to come with various such), you can apply that to a snippet of audio or entire clips in Sonar.
I just checked and Word (for example) behaves like you propose so it's not unusual behaviour.
Similarly (although I think this was fixed, as it was broken for years), the recent list should be updated on open, so a crash before save doesn't not write to the recent file list.
Unless the compressor is before the A/D converter, no difference from applying it after the event. Recording with reverb/delay for vocals or through an amp sim for guitar makes sense, but that's still recording dry.