If something goes wrong Anderton is to blame :)
Seriously if you are crashing in the first couple of seconds its possibly a similar issue that one or two people had where their account status was invalid. If you recently cancelled your membership and renewed very shortly later there was a glitch where it thinks that you are not an active member. You should contact support on Monday and they will help you with that if so. If you can upload your crash dump somewhere and pm me the link I can check if that is the issue.
Regarding VST scanning, again its a complete misconception that having automatic scanning on slows down the load of SONAR. For one, if you have the
default SONAR scan options it will only ever load
newly added plugins. This should take literally 2-3 seconds if there are no new plugs to go through the list even if you have a 1000 plugins since its doing very little work and just comparing time stamps.
You should never turn on the option to rescan failed plugins and rescan existing (unless you are troubleshooting something) since those options waste time loading and rebuilding the inventory every time.
Even when scanning plugins keep in mind that the task is performed by the scanner in a different process, so it will NOT impact the startup time of SONAR. I have all the waves plugins installed on my system and SONAR launches in 2 seconds so it has nothing to do with scan being on.
Regarding how past updates would be delivered in the future - My understanding was that all older content updates would continue be available to customers via command center even in the future. i.e there should be no need to manually back them up on your machine. Of course new members who join later may not have access to prior monthly updates if they were exclusive to that month.