I'm trying to set up a master template on one of my servers (that has 128gb of RAM nonetheless, so you can imagine I'm adding quite a lot of instruments in VE Pro).
Twice now, I've had to recreate the entire template because when I'd go to open it up again to test loading times, VEP kept giving me an "no MIDI devices ofund" error on startup and all the MIDI ports disappeared, as well as all but 1 of the server instances. I thought at first I somehow created it in VEP standalone instead of the server version. Second time, same thing, only I finally noticed that using Ctrl-S makes VEP save the file with a .VEP extension instead of VESP64. The save icon on the toolbar does the same thing. Only by going to File->Save or Save as will VEP save the file as a server project instead of a regular project.
There is also no keyboard shortcut documented for the save options in the file menu: the shortcuts listed in the manual will cause VEP to save it with a .VEP extension.
Needless to say, this is extremely frusterating not only because the software is saving it in the totally wrong format for the application (if I'm running the server version of VEP, it should default to the VESP server project file format), but there is also no way to create my own shortcut for the correct command, which when I'm building templates (especially large ones) and save progress frequently to have to go into the file menu each time is inconvienent. Autosave will keep saving it in the original format, so screwing it up the first time you save doesn't help you.
Lastly, I'm shocked that VEP will even allow a project with multiple instances to be saved under the different format, since clearly the VEP file format only allows for a single instance (based on my experience). But still, the fact that the program has 2 different save features, AND the fact that this is not documented in the manual, AND the fact that there is no way to customize that makes it, like I said, very frusterating. I sincerely hope that this is changed in the near future.
EDIT: after scrolling through the manual again, it does kind of mention the VEP vs VESP saving, but IMO it is not clear enough that they are 2 completely different saving options, and that they are not compatible with one another and that saving a server project as VEP will break it the next time you try to load it. Again, this should be customizable with shortcuts.