Kontakt weirdly long closing time and GUI freeze in Cubase 9

This thing has now has really started to interrupt my workflow, I’ve checked a lot of ‘fixes’ so I’m guessing this problem could be in a small corner? What am I missing? Any help would be appreciated!

I’m currently on Cubase 9, using Kontakt 5.6.6. The issue popped up when using 5.6.5 but I haven’t updated to 5.6.8 on purpose since there were presumably even more problems with that build. When opening an instance of kontakt in a project it pops up reasonably fast. However, after closing the instance, the whole GUI turns white, Cubase freezes (if I close it while audio playing, the audio continues but the GUI of Cubase also freezes), and I get big CPU and memory spikes. Loading and unloading libraries within Kontakt all goes at a rate I’d expect it to. (almost instantly)

I’ve got Cubase and Kontakt on an internal 500gb SSD, my project files on an internal 1TB (7200rpm) HDD, and I load my kontakt libraries from an external HDD (7200rpm, USB3). I’ve got 16gbs of RAM and an Intel i7-6700HQ CPU running at 2.60GHz. (I’m doubting specs or ‘bad health drives’ are the issue here)

Any thoughts?

I’ve got the same Kontakt version and have no problems. That’s in C9.3.

Kontakt is running fine here. So there is no problem for me. Hope your running the 64bit VST3 version and not under Jbridjge 1.75 or so, Jbridge Plugins do work but freeze up for some time (sometimes). Though i am using Halion 6.

Did you manage to find a fix for this?