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
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.
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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!