Thanks for the responses -- with pictures no less!
It really seems odd to me that you can't just select two mono tracks, right click on one of them, and select an option to "combine to stereo track." Conversely, the ability to click on a stereo track and select "split to dual mono tracks" seems like a no-brainer function as well.
That aside, the three methods of combining dual mono tracks to a single stereo appear to be:
1) Send L/R panned tracks to bus, then bounce the bus to a stereo track.
2) Solo L/R panned tracks and mix down.
3) Select all clips on L/R panned tracks, then bounce to a stereo track.
One nice thing about the bus approach, as noted above, is that no "selection" is needed -- you just get the entire track. Also, you can keep using the same bus over and over, which is kind of nice.
Do all three methods result in bit for bit identical tracks? It seems like the bus and bounce method would, but I'm not entirely clear about the mixdown.
While we're on this subject, to produce the inverse process -- i.e. take a stereo track and split it into two L/R mono tracks -- I took the stereo track, panned it full left, and sent it to a new, mono bus. I then bounced this bus to a new mono track and panned this track full left. I repeated the same process, but this time panning full right at each step. The result appears to be back to my original, dual mono tracks. Would I be correct that this is one of the easier ways of doing this?
Thanks again for all the help here,
Larry