Thank you ckon, did both of those things - installed via Native Access several times. They are installed and show up in the instrument list when I open an instrument track the dialogue box says No VST Instrument more info: In Plug-In Manager they are are grayed out - not in blacklist or instrument list- oddly enought Kontakt 5 is perfect but I really want to work with Absynth right now…
Load up a reaktor synth ensemble and treat it like any other vsti synth. As long as the ensemble has inputs and outputs set you are good to go. Just ‘Render in place’ the Cubase instrument track for Reaktor.