Live 5 going insane scanning VST pllugins -- help?

[Mr. Slater's Parrot]

Live 5 users,

I've just upgraded (from Live 4 which ran fine) and installed Live 5. But I can't get it to run. Upon initial startup, it is trying to do a VST plugin scan. Of what, I don't know. It looks like it is trying to scan every dll file in my Program Files directory -- or possibly on my entire drive! As it scans this vast, unchartered territory, it finds problem dlls and barfs. I can't seem to find any way to stop it from trying to do this insane, initial scan. I can't set any option in Live 5 itself, obviously, because Live 5 can't start up for the first time. I can't seem to find any settings in regedit for it. I've renamed my VST folder and Live 5 still scans -- so it seems like it must be scanning some arbitrary place where it shouldn't be looking.

Does anyone know of any way to change the default scanning behavior of Live 5 upon first-time-ever start up? Otherwise, I seem to be hosed.

Thanks.

[aMUSEd]

I had the same problem with Wavelab (not a recent version) - why on earth do they make software that scans for plugins by default rather than giving you the option to tell it where you want it to scan first? - seems very stupid.

Just a thought but there's a registry key that sets the default VST plugin folder - you could try setting that temporarily to a dummy folder with just one plugin in and see if that works - then hopefully once you've loaded it up you will be able to tell it where to look and change your regsitry setting to what you want.

[Mr. Slater's Parrot]

Thanks, aMUSEd.

Actually, the first thing I tried was to disable the default VST folder. Live 5 is scanning somewhere else, anyway, because it keeps finding stuff that isn't in that particular folder.

I can't figure out, either, why anyone would release a product that goes who-knows-where all over your disk drive scanning stuff instead of letting you tell it the correct place. Drives me crazy!

[Mr. Slater's Parrot]

Ok, I found it. Live keeps this stuff in special files in "...Documents and Settings\Application Data\Ableton\...". Apparently it tries to bring over data from previous versions -- without asking, of course. Anyway, I got rid of all that junk and was able to do a clean, initial startup. What a pain!