Please help me fix the mess Native Access has made of my system - plugins not working etc. etc. 64-bit loading as 32-bit

[sjm]

Update: I have managed to get everything working apart from Kontakt. What I did was junk all the installations, clean out the registry and remove Native Access. Then I reinstalled the products from my Komplete Ultimate hard disk and activated everything in Service Center.

However, Kontakt will only work up to 5.6.5. The later versions still crash on start-up (I've tried 5.6.6 and 5.8.1).


Original post follows

This is going to be a little confusing, so apologies for that. I will try and explain what my issues currently are and how I got here. I know I am not the only person to have massive issues with NA, so I'm hoping there might be someone out there who has gone through this whole rigmarole or has some insights that might help.

My system is Win 7 (SP1), 64-bit. I have all the latest updates installed.

The current situation
My current situation is that I have issues loading up most of the VSTis in Komplete. FM8 and Absynth will start in standalone; all the rest will crash on startup ("has stopped responding"). And all of them have issues loading as VSTs.

When I try and scan the VSTs themselves in both Reaper and FL Studio, the VSTs cause crashes too. Interestingly, the x64 plugins are crashing the in-built bit bridges in both DAWs. I am running the 64-bit version of Reaper and FL Studio. So something is very wrong with the DLLs that they are being picked up as 32-bit and loading in the bit bridge. Some of the 32-bit versions run fine bridged btw.

What I've tried
There are various suggestions on how to deal with startup crashes with the executables.

• I've tried setting the sample rate of my interfaces to 44.1KHz instead of 48KHz.
• I've cleared out the registry entries
• I've deleted the databases in AppData
• I've re-installed from Native Access
• I've uninstalled the plugins completely in Windows, and re-installed them again
• Uninstalling Service Center (which was also crashing, and hadn't been an issue before
• Uninstalling and re-installing Native Access
• Some other things probably, but I've forgotten right now

However, bearing in mind that I have the same issue with the DLLs too, I don't think it's a sound driver issue etc. There seems to be some deeper issue with the installation.

Origins of the problem
About a week ago, I realised that one of my Waves plugins wasn't showing up in FL Studio. I did a full VST scan (needed to make the plugins show up individually as opposed to just the waveshell), and during this scan I noticed a bunch of errors with my Native Instruments plugins. Now these plugins had been working absolutely fine for years, but suddenly they were throwing a whole bunch of errors. I had not updated any of the DLLs for years, due to NA giving me BSOD whenever I tried to install anything.

However, I had run Native Access shortly beforehand to see if this BSOD issue still persisted and to see if I could install the Analog Dreams freebie. I'm pretty sure it updated to a new version of Native Access while doing this. However, the BSOD issues still persisted, with only 1 or 2 products being able to install. So I didn't actually make any changes to my working system (but what NA did is open for speculation).

Given that my NI plugins were now all borked, I decided to re-investigate the issue with BSOD in order to try and reinstall my plugins. I fixed this issues, which was related to Intel's rapid storage technology; uninstalling the SATA chipset driver and reverting to the default MS one did the trick.

However, reinstalling (see above) made no difference to the issues with the plugins. Of course, Native Access does not keep the installers around, so I have no way of knowing what versions of the plugins I had installed beforehand, nor do I have a way of installing the previous version and returning the a working system (I don't actually need to update the plugins).

In the process, I also relocated my plugins. I had moved the DLLs to another folder due to issues with other applications (Vegas) that don't do whitelisting etc. so NA was moaning about needing to repair the installations. All that involved however is pointing to the new folder. Note that this relocation happened after the plugins stopped working, so it's not the cause.


My best guesses and theories

I suspect that something may have happened when I started/upgraded NA and/or when the installations blue screened. Maybe something to do with my license got screwed? It's not the first time Native Access has decided to completely bork my installation of Komplete Ultimate. At least last time, reinstalling the products fixed the issues; not this time. However, I'm not 100% sure how the licensing actually works (registry entry? hidden service?) to know whether simply starting NA and/or relocating installations would be enough to break this.

It looks like the newly installed DLLs are being misinterpreted as 32-bit despite them being installed in the 64-bit folder and being loaded in a 64-bit host. Loading the 32-bit versions of some of the plugins works, albeit bridged. Both Reaper and FL Studio are trying to bridge the 64-bit versions unnecessarily. I have noticed that the DLLs that have since been installed and some of the old ones I had installed (and backed up for now real reason) are different sizes. If I restore the old DLL, the plugins miraculously work again. However, I only have a couple of the DLLs around, plus I'm not sure what bit version they all are - is there an easy way to check?

NI support is hopeless, which is why I'm hoping someone here might have some insight/suggestions as to what could have caused working installations to break. Or what the various symptoms (64-bit DLL being misidentified as 32-bit and being bridged) might indicate.


__________________________________________________
Sorry for the rambling post, I was trying to get as much pertinent info as possible down, but I appreciate it's a bit of a mess. Let me know if you would like anything clarified or have any specific questions. Your help is much appreciated!

[Pictus]

Your Windows installation is borked, instead of wasting your time trying
to "catch the hanging carrot", do a clean Windows installation...

But before do a memory test.
https://youtu.be/1AnrV23AHNo

[The Noodlist]

I had a problem with Kontakt crashing when my firewall blocked internet access, but disabling the network adapter didn't crash it..
Have you installed over the original plugins to a different location?

Windows 7 is now legacy, you could upgrade to Windows 10 for free, and have the option to refresh the system, it's a lot more flexible than Windows 7.

I used to wipe Window 7 once a year, something always caused me problems (lost IK activations), not with Win 10, I set it up to look like Win 7.

Sometimes the easiest option is to start from fresh and then make a new backup. Deactivate whatever possible first.

[glokraw]

Sorry for the rambling post, I was trying to get as much pertinent info as possible down, but I appreciate it's a bit of a mess. Let me know if you would like anything clarified or have any specific questions. Your help is much appreciated!

I suspect you have battles between dot net frameworks
installed by competing products with poor regard for
system integrity, and I doubt there is an easy fix.

NI sometimes suggest installing all the frameworks in one go,
after a registry clear-out, but in my limited experience,
this does not fix 3rd party fiascos. A full new install
will probably be the fastest, if not only solution.

Which has the brite side of not including things you rarely
or no longer use. De-activate advice above is good,
especially with ilok-manager based softwares,
and maybe others. And it's a great time for some new
SSD drives and ram upgrades to be deployed!
If ya gotta be sick, be sick with a super-model

Good luck!

[sjm]

Thanks a lot for your input.

I've got an update... I have managed to get everything working apart from Kontakt. What I did was junk all the installations, clean out the registry and remove Native Access. Then I reinstalled the products from my Komplete Ultimate hard disk and activated everything in Service Center.

However, Kontakt will only work up to 5.6.5. The later versions still crash on start-up (I've tried 5.6.6 and 5.8.1). Not sure what's different in the later versions - it might be a different redistributable...

I suspect you have battles between dot net frameworks installed by competing products with poor regard for system integrity, and I doubt there is an easy fix.

NI sometimes suggest installing all the frameworks in one go, after a registry clear-out, but in my limited experience, this does not fix 3rd party fiascos. A full new install will probably be the fastest, if not only solution.

Good luck!

So yes, I do suspect there's the possibility of framework conflicts. I have also updated all frameworks manually etc. etc. I haven't tried reinstalling Kontakt since doing this, because I have better things to do, and all my libs should be compatible with 5.6.5. The only real issue that this will pose is if I try to open projects that were saved with a more recent version. Thankfully I didn't update to 5.8.1 until relatively recently (because donkey tugger sent me a library he'd made in that version). So I'll cross that bridge when I get there. With a few exceptions I will have only made minimal changes to the patch, so replacing 5.8 with 5.6.5 and reloading the library should work in those cases. It's only the projects that use drum libraries that will be borked, as I always tweak those relatively heavily. Fingers crossed that this only affects a select few projects.

I have read various items on the interwebs that mention issues with libraries causing Kontakt to crash when they are installed, but not activated, or borked in some other way. However, removing the few third party libraries I own didn't make a difference. I'm not sure however if there might not still be leftover remnants somewhere that a throwing a spanner into the works.

For a while, I'd be seeing products in Service Center that are only available in Native Access. Most of these are now gone - only Phasis is still showing up; no libraries any more.

Your Windows installation is borked, instead of wasting your time trying
to "catch the hanging carrot", do a clean Windows installation...

Reinstalling Windows is not going to happen. I use this PC for more than just making music, and reinstalling everything is just not worth the hassle for Kontakt 5.8. It would take weeks to get back to where I am now with reinstalling all the software. I'll do that when I upgrade the PC

I had a problem with Kontakt crashing when my firewall blocked internet access, but disabling the network adapter didn't crash it..
Have you installed over the original plugins to a different location

That's interesting. Was this with a specific version (if you can remember)? As posted above, up to 5.6.5 installs fine. I recently installed a VPN for work/home office purposes, which I have since uninstalled - no difference. Bear in mind that my hardware and drivers are the same as about 2 weeks ago when everything was working fine. So I'm tending towards thinking this is less likely, but maybe worth thinking about. It might be something innocuous that I installed recently, though looking through the list of installed applications doesn't throw up anything that suspicious.

The Waves update did however install a different C++ redistributable. However removing it made no difference (to Kontakt at least).

[The Noodlist]

I had a problem with Kontakt crashing when my firewall blocked internet access, but disabling the network adapter didn't crash it..

That's interesting. Was this with a specific version (if you can remember)? As posted above, up to 5.6.5 installs fine.

Version 5 upwards, it's the free version that runs Vintage Organs, I installed multiple versions for older recordings.