I did a complete reinstall of Win7 from scratch and installed only Platinum, Ivory, and Superior Drummer and it fixed the dropout problem I was having. Now I'm trying to restore all the soft synths and plugins. I was wondering how safe is it to simply copy the old VST directory from my previous Win7 install into the Cakewalk directories? I can get VST scan to scan them and I would think it'd be a done deal. I'm not exactly sure what goes on during an install as far as all these different folders and registry entries.
 
When I installed Platinum, I did a manual install not Command Center and only installed the Platinum file, no other add ons. I went ahead and installed X1 and selected most pluggins and soft synths, but didn't install the program files. 8.5 has a few pluggins, so I tried installing it and found that I had to install 8.0 1st, which I did.
 
I'm leery of installing an old version of Sonar, thinking it may replace some files in Platinum that I need. If anyone knows if this is safe let me know. When I ran the installer for 8.5, I again didn't install the program files, but did install some plugins and soft synths I needed.
 
I think V-vocal may have been installed by 8.0. I found It's directory and compared them to my old Win7 install and saw that they were older files. Since V-vocal was improved upon some time in the past. I wanted to be sure I had the latest files, so I simply replaced the old files in it's directory with the newer ones. I used V-vocal a lot today, so it appears that didn’t have a bad effect.
 
So this brings back to the big question, is it ok to copy the old folders for plugins and soft synths that were in the other Cakewalk install into the new one?

It's preferable to install the oldest version first, progressing to newer ones.
There are Shared utilities like, vstscan, plugin manager etc that may be overwritten on installation so it's feasible that a newer version may be overwritten by an older one.

Tread carefully and make sure to read windows that pop up during installations. Mind you, you can do advanced installs selecting just various plugins you want without any risk. The only exception to this is VVocal that requires the whole Sonar program installed because you don't see it a selection during an advanced install. I don't think VVocal needs the Sonar program, its just the way the installer is packaged though don't quote me on it. It's just a conclusion I came to from my own experience with trouble shooting VVocal problems in the past.

You shouldn't have to copy anything as that would be taken care of by the paths set for VST scanning. If you mean the actual plugin program folder eg for a softsynth, then no you can't do that.

The dll files that are the actual VST plugin can usually be moved around as you like, don't forget to redirect the scan paths for Sonar if you do move them. Don't move any DX or DXi plugins or folders as they require an installation process which registers them in the Windows registry. Hope that answers all your question.