All smooth for us. We were (are) a Canadian-British couple, applied back in 2012. All pretty straight forward. We were living in the UK for the whole of the process. Sponsor approval took 3 months, London took another 3 months. The only thing we heard from CIC was around June when they called my husband to ask if we had actually gotten married (we applied in January and got married in April and had included wedding plans in our application, things like booking the hotel and the officiant and such). 3 weeks later Mr Schnooks got his passport request, that was sent a few weeks later, and COPR arrived a month after that. All pretty straight forward! We also didn't have anything funky in our application... we met at work, started dating, moved in together, he proposed, we got married. Nothing special at all. First marriage for both of us, no kids (yet!), no criminal past, and a pretty complete application, nothing missing or complicated or whatever. Pretty much as textbook as it gets, I think!
(And the only reason we had a passport request instead of straight to DM was because some idiot at CIC looked at the wrong date for my husband's passport expiry... he applied for his police certificate on his old passport which expired Sept 2012. He renewed his passport between getting the certificate and us sending in the PR app, so the passport was good until Sept 2022... but the stupid guy looked at the old date, so did a passport request in order to check validity for the expiry date of the COPR. Dumbass. Luckily for us it didn't matter anyway, we weren't landing until December, but could have done without the extra paperwork and faff!)
http://britishexpats.com/wiki/Spousal_Sponsorship-Canada#Can_I_wait_in_Canada_while_my_application_is_being_processed:_Dual_Intent
