How I accidentally broke Cubase (Then repaired it)

Hi all,
I’m Posting this just incase it’s useful information for someone else.
So a few days back I completely broke Cubase 11 and 12, which had both been working perfectly until that point. (One crashed on startup everytime and the other left me unable to load any projects at all without crashing.) I was sweating at no longer being able to access any of my projects and was starting to panic until I remembered that earlier I had done what I thought was some housekeeping on my pc. I had noticed that there were some VST2 dll’s in the :Program files/Commonfiles/VST3 Folder, So I deleted them, Seeing that there were already VST3 versions of the same plugsins also in that folder, I assumed it would be safe and perhaps even benificial. Big mistake, this completly threw Cubase to my surprise. And lead to aforementioned crashes every time I either tried to load the program in one version of cubase or load a project in the other. (Can’t remember which version did which, Sorry - And bit scared to try reproduce again)



Luckily having realised my potential mistake I was able to restore the deleted files from the recycle bin and everything then worked perfectly again - Phew! I had in the mean time tried trashing prefs etc, but that did not resole problems.
Pics just to show folders I messed with, and as I said all I did was remove what I thought should not be there anyway. Perhaps this might help someone else, Or at least serve as a warning to be very careful what you delete - Maybe stating the obvious there I know!
Cheers all.

1 Like

It seems you have solved the issue by yourself, but Cubase should still not crash, even if the plugins crash. Would be nice if you could leave a vote here if you think the same:

Solution to crashes by plugins - Sandboxing (Crash protection) - Cubase - Steinberg Forums

The plugins didn’t crash, how could they if they were removed? please read my post again, If anything it seems to be the fact they were removed, and for some reason cubase was still expecting them to be there that caused the crash. And now( as before I messed up) everything is again working perfectly for me.

Don’t know for sure how Ozone plugins work, but this looks like the VST3 versions need the VST2 versions to work (as soon as you used the VST3 versions inside your projects) and if there is missing the VST2 file they crash. Thats why I posted here. Cause in that case sandboxing might enable you to open your project and check, what is causing the issue.
If they were just missing, Cubase would tell you that in a separate message. But this is easy to verify:
If you remove both VST3 and VST2 versions and Cubase still crashes, than this is clearly a issue with Cubase, otherwhise this seems to be an issue, where I’d contact the plugin vendor.

Well it’s not an issue at all again now as everything is working. :grinning: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

And i’m not voting in the sandboxing thread as I recognise it’s an area in which I don’t have enough knowledge to come to a firm conclusion.