Here is a summary of the latest and greatest info...
I reverted Kontakt to the previous version and I reverted VE Pro to the previous version (uninstall and then install), however, I was still constantly crashing. I decided to update both VE Pro and Kontakt back to their latest and greatest versions.
VSL Support did get back to me and told me they saw NICloudCommunication in the logs and this indicated it was Kontakt that was crashing. I sent this to NI and am waiting on a response from them. However, the response from VSL Support didn't sit well with me so I continued to explore.
Using a Time Machine backup I was able to go back to a version of my Pro Tools session from Sunday.. I had to redo several things but this seemed to get me going for awhile. This says to me that maybe some bad/corrupt data ended up being stored in my session.
I continued to work on building my template throughout the day and then eventually VE Pro started crashing regularly again. It seemed to crash anytime I attempted to connect to one specific instance. I tried this 3 times and each time it crashed every time I told it to connect to this instance. This points to my earlier hypothesis that there is some bad/corrupt data getting stored in my Pro Tools session. So, I decided to delete the instance and start setting it up again from scratch. This seemed to be going well, however, after adding 9 or 10 plugins to the instance it crashed once again.
I have sent 4 crash reports to VSL Support, all of which look a little different. Only the first one had something about NICloudCommunication.
So, at this point in time although I am still experiencing a ton of crashing and I'm not sure how to proceed at this point in time.