In case it might help anyone else seeing this problem, here’s an update on it on my system. It’s still too early to proclaim, “mission accomplished,” or that I’ve found the definitive catalyst for this issue, but some new findings from yesterday and this morning strongly suggest it does relate to Waves Nx plugins (I’ve been specifically using the Ocean Way Nashville one with Cubase 12 thus far).
I use the Waves Nx plugins (not only Ocean Way Nashville, but also Abbey Road Studio 3, and CLA Nx at various times) as a Control Room insert when mixing in the evening due to needing to use headphones instead of my monitors. Because I’d been working on mixes almost exclusively in C12, I was just leaving the plugin in the Control Room slot, just disabling it when it wasn’t needed (and usually also at the end of my sessions). In Cubase 11, having used the Nx plugins in a session seemingly increased the odds of a hang on exit, where C11 would need to be killed from Task Manager. However, in recent months, that problem was rare, perhaps partly due to Waves 13 allowing to avoid the extra head tracking window that was always there, whether you needed it or not, in earlier Waves versions, and partly because I was paying close attention to closing my project first, then waiting a while (specifically until I could hover over the Windows close button and see it turn red) to close Cubase itself.
With C12, with maybe one or two exceptions, I have not seen Cubase hang on exit and need to be killed with Task Manager in this scenario. However, I’d get the crash message on startup. Until yesterday, I hadn’t looked at the crash dump files, but I decided to do that yesterday and noticed I had 18 of them for less than a week’s use of C12, versus only 15 for Cubase 9.5, 10, 10.5, and 11 combined! I also looked at the time stamps on those files and noticed they were not from when I closed Cubase but from the start of Cubase sessions.
Since I haven’t been mixing the last few days, this gave me the idea to remove Ocean Way Nashville from my Control Room, close my project, exit Cubase, and restart C12 to see what happened. I still got the crash message starting the next time, but now I was starting this new session without the Nx plugin in Control Room. At the end of my day’s session, I tried restarting Cubase after exiting. This time no crash message. Also Cubase started this morning with no crash message.
As I mentioned above, it’s too early proclaim this information to be definitive, but it is sure seeming like closing a C12 session in which this Nx plugin (and probably any of the Nx plugins) was in, whether it was used or not during the session, may be the catalyst for these crash messages on startup. Thus, if you are having this problem regularly, it would be worth noting if you are using one of the Nx plugins in your session, and trying to see if you do a session entirely without it, if C12 starts up normally the next time.
If this it, I sure hope Steinberg and Waves can figure out why this happens and get it resolved as the C12 behavior is decidedly worse than the behavior in earlier Cubase releases.