VCA Faders causing lag and freezing

I’m currently building a new template in Cubase and am in the process of setting up VCA faders to control a bunch of outputs from VEPro 6. When I’m creating these faders, I notice that random tracks acquire a white bar on the left side of them that blinks. While they are blinking, Cubase has jumpy lag every 2 seconds or so that freezes the program for a second, and then unfreezes it. I honestly have no idea why it blinks and no idea what it is for. You can see what I"m talking about in the image I attached. When I delete a VCA, the white bars will go away and so does my lag. But these bars start blinking randomly on random tracks. And seem to go away randomly if I click on different things. I can’t find a pattern for any of it.
What’s more odd is that the one oboe track in the image that has a white bar is tied to a different VCA than all the flute tracks. And for some reason the top legato flute track isn’t blinking, even though it’s tied to the same VCA as the rest of the flute tracks.

Even though the lag can come and go whether the white bars are active or not, eventually making a new VCA will at some point freeze Cubase and I have to force quit the program and reopen the project. The issue isn’t playback or midi controller related.

Also as a PS side note, the “record enable/monitor” setting on the link group settings does nothing when checked. It still only record enables the track i select, not all that are linked.

I’m on Windows 10 x64, Cubase 9.