I had a song crash (Sonar Platinum). The error dialog mentioned RealRick.vst3 as the culprit. So I'm going through Sonar's Plugin Manager and see that the RealRick.dll file is in 4 different places. How it self-replicated is beyond my understanding. Before I go in there and start doing surgery, is there a safe and reliable way to consolidate all these plugins?
 
Can I sweep all of the plugins into one folder and delete the originals?

You may have a VST 2 and a VST 3 version, in both 64-bit and 32-bit, which would account for 4 versions of that dll.
 
A while back, some Arturia VST 3 plugins would crash Sonar, and that was remedied by using the VST 2 version of those plugins.
 
Perhaps you can try using the VST 2 version of your failing plugin to see if that is more stable.  The audio quality of both the VST 2 and VST 3 versions of it will sound the same - the differences between the two specifications are not audio related, so that might well be a good workaround for you, for the moment - until such time as the VST 3 version starts to work with Sonar.
 
Bob Bone