Thank you for your reply, it’s much appreciated. As Cubase loaded easily with third party plugins disabled, I moved all of my third party vst3’s to another folder, then began transferring them back to their original “Program Files/Common Files/VST3” folder in groups of 4 or 5, loading Cubase after each group to see if it was stalling at VST3 scanning. I eventually found one virtual instrument that was causing this new extended stalling (on previous updates of Cubase, it may have only caused a shorter “stalling” upon loading). I uninstalled and then reinstalled this plugin and everything loaded perfectly, sometimes with only a short pause on the scanning VST3’s procedure. Cubase 13 Pro now loads faster than it ever has, which is such a plus for my workflow.