All of a sudden Cubase 8.5 is giving me this strange blank option in my insert list. Does anyone know how to get rid of it?
Hi,
Plese open Plug-in Manager, can you see any “empty” plug-in here? Or anything strange?
Yeah, it shows me pretty much the same thing - a blank option. I tried clicking on it and hit delete, and also using the X button on the top right but neither worked
Trash of Preferences would probably fix it.
I tried that and it didn’t work
Well you are in the default collection so it is no surprise you can’t delete it (default collection is not editable)
Can you find anything odd in the list on the left of Plugin manager…if you order by name is there one with no name at the top?
Well, no. I went through all of them and they all seem normal. However, I kinda did a workaround based on what you said and created a new collection also called “Default.” Then I could delete that blank option 
Any idea how I can remove the original Default collection? It just bugs me a little that I have 2 Default collections now.
You can’t remove the default…the default collection will always contains every plugin that Cubase has scanned at startup.
A custom collection (which is what you created even though you called it default) will be fixed as it was created unless it is manually updated. So when you install a new plug it won’t show up until you also add it to the collection.
I would suggest calling it something else to avoid later confusion.
When you select this blank “plug-in” opin the Pkug-in Manager, can you click to the info button to get some details?
Could you check your VST folder, if there is no unexpected DLL or VST3 file in it?