aghschwabe
As for the problems themselves: The only change to the system in question was Kingston. Symptoms: no sustain pedal on any instrument (verified it works with stand-alone plugins and two other DAWs), and IRIS2 just outputs hissing on the left channel and bit-crunched noise in the left channel.
Rolling back to Jamaica Plain solves the issues with noise and plugin instability (since IRIS2 has a 100% failure to load rate for me in Kingston), but the sustain pedal is still MIA. Weirdly, my Imagine-Line plugs (notably Harmor) appear more stable.
I had the sustain pedal issue and bitcrush noise on some plugins (Addictive Drums 2 namely) when I tried out the update yesterday for a few minutes, but oddly enough while my sustain pedal wasn't working, the pedal I had set to output sostenuto was acting like a sustain pedal while using Lounge Lizard EP-4. Not sure if it's only on that plugin though, since I didn't have a chance to check and test out other vsts before heading to bed.
I don't mind that Kingston is being weird since JP works great on both of my awful systems, but it was nice being able to see how fast Kingston loads things up.