If you want to be sure about whether or not ASW is actually being disabled, turn on the ASW Status overlay HUD. There is a drop-down list of overlays you can choose from on the same tab of the Tray Tool which give a wealth of useful information. On the ASW one, it’ll just show text that says something like “ASW Status: Available” or “ASW Status: Not available.” If ASW really is disabled, it’ll say “not available.” If it’s active and generating frames, it’ll tell you that too.
As for your framerate being capped at 36, it’s possible ASW isn’t actually off (Do what I said above to be sure). But it’s also possible that’s where your performance headroom is forcing the frame sync to render. One thing that many people seem to not realize about VR is that frame sync is critical. You can’t just run intermediate, dithering frame rates without creating judder. This is because of the stereoscopic rendering for each eye, and how we perceive things being out of sync between them. What would be just an ugly frame tear on a 2D screen is a jarring stutter in VR. Because of this, “getting a few extra frames” in VR isn’t of any use. There are certain thresholds you have to hit, and if you don’t, the frame sync of the VR runtime will force the fps to an even multiple of the native refresh rate (assuming it’s actually working correctly… Link has been pretty darn buggy in this regard ever since its conception. The native pcvr headsets-Rift and Rift S-have much smoother performance with ASW, and that’s sad, because ASW is by far the best motion smoothing algorithm of any VR system. But they haven’t done a very good job of robustly porting it over to Link.)