Hi Paul,
Nothing seems to have changed. Everything is as it was before I updated the license. I tried reinstalling VEP, and the first time it opened it did not attempt to do the sample data caching with kontakt. But then, unfortunately, one of the synthesizers I had loaded into the project caused it to crash, and after that every time it would do the caching. After testing it repeatedly, it seems that one of my synths is causing VEP to crash every single time. It seems to be either Serum, Zebra, Massive or Element. Are you aware of any compatability issues with any of these? Quite annoying considering once I loaded it in, I now can no longer open the project, as it just crashes when it gets to loading in the synths.
EDIT: Can now confirm it is Waves Element. I removed the waveshell vst from the plugins folder that was included in VEP's preferences and the project was loaded properly.