Matthias and @Sotoko , please disregard my previous report. It isn’t fixed, I’m afraid.
When I updated VEPro, it somehow defaulted to 8 ports (instead of my usual 48 ports) so it loaded instantly and I thought it got fixed.
As soon as I changed to 48 ports, the dreadful load times returned. 59s per instance. And it now takes almost 6 minutes to CLOSE one instance. Rolled back to 12.0.0 and it works without a hitch – both load and close times are instantaneous, how it used to be prior to 12.0.10.