"The wave forms are just solid and not the skinny waves at the beginning."
I had something like this a couple years ago. I'd record a track and it would be fine. I'd save it, and then the next time I opened the session, the visible waveform would be a solid block of noise, and the sound would be pure, screeching distortion. I lost a few tracks that way. Drove me nuts. Then I went into wave properties for those wavs and found out that Cool Edit had been saving those particular wavs as a different wav type, and for some reason when the session loaded, it converted those different wav types into shrieking noise. Anyway, what I did was to go through all of my sessions and make sure every track was saved as the same type of wav - in Edit View, click Save As>Options>your selection. In my case, I've decided to go with '32-bit Normalized Float (Type 3) - Default'. Hope this helps.
And the lesson I learned from this is that you have to *select* the wav type you want each track saved as, you can't trust Cool/Audition to do it automatically in a consistent or sensible way.