Cubase 6.0.7 - Long pause at 0% before audio export begins

I’m working on a project with a very, very large template. When I export audio - be it a mixdown of the entire session, or just a solo’d track for the purpose of rendering audio - there is a very long pause before the export begins. The dialogue comes up and stays at 0% for quite a while. There is a bit of an additional pause once we hit 100% and the export finally does complete without error.

This doesn’t happen to me in any other projects, just all the projects with this one template in particular. There are a lot of soundtoys plugins, which I think are very resource intensive, as well as many instances of VE Pro. Nonetheless, I have had similar projects/templates where I did not encounter this pause. The pause can be as long as 1-2 minutes. When I have to create stems for the mixer in a couple of weeks, I’m hoping I can have this resolved. Anyone have any ideas?

Bump…