Problem with "all" WAVES plugins (Plugin Load Balancing ??)

Hmm are you seeing issues even with load balancing off? We havent seen any issues with waves plugins but we will double check. Which version of SONAR did you update from - were you running the 08 release earlier?

Waves (V9 R18) is very old indeed. Apr 2014.
 
You can download and install later versions using WAVES Central. This does not affect licensing. If you have a valid license (e.g. USB dongle) WAEVS plugs continue working as before. I did the upgrade from R27 when I upgraded to win10 and had no problems with the upgrade (i.e. new installation of newer WAVES plugs)

Thank you. 
Than I have to talk with my customer because I do not own the licenses and I have not his Username for the WAVES central. The licenses are borrowed by the customer.
And the customer wants that all thousend of digitizations projects are in the old WAVES Version. because he is afraid of changing in sound when changing the version.
It is not about music, but about speech from tapes.
First - It must be determinded if there is any sound difference between versions.
Thank you.

First, a correction from my previous post where I said I use no VST3 plugins. I had a look, and this turns out to be untrue - unbeknownst to me I did in fact have several VST3 plugins installed, one of which is WaveShell. And it initializes OK here.
 
Although audible differences between versions seems unlikely, the only way to know with certainty would be a null test. That would require having access to both versions of each plugin in use, which you probably don't. What you could do is pick a short wave file that you could send, unprocessed, to someone who has the newer versions of the same plugins, along with detailed settings. I'd be glad to do such a test for you, but I have only a very limited collection of Waves plugins. I'm sure somebody with a more exhaustive complement of Waves plugins would step up to help.

bitflipper
 
Although audible differences between versions seems unlikely, the only way to know with certainty would be a null test.

that's probably a good idea to test for yourself and also to convince the customer that it is the same - assuming it works ;-)
 
upgrade to later WAVES plugs, open old project & bounce, if identical keep (make new backup), if not roll back to usable version and stay there...

As someone who provides tech support in my day job, and has done so for 35 years, I guarantee the first thing Waves Support will suggest is updating the plugins. Step #1 is always to bring the software up-to-date and see if the problem is still reproducible. It's unlikely they'd be able to reproduce Thomas' exact setup anyway, and even if they could, they're not likely to pursue it if it doesn't apply to the current revision.
 
Unfortunately, the OP's situation is highly unusual. Not unique, but unusual.
 
When I did O/S support back in the day, I had a nuclear power plant that was so far out of rev there were only a couple guys in the office who were knowledgeable about their software. Newer, younger guys (like me) would tell them to upgrade. But the plant was under strict NRC regulations that made it extremely difficult and time-consuming to upgrade any software, requiring them to stay on a known stable version for years and years. It was, after all, a nuclear power plant! If it ain't broke, don't touch it. 
 
For them, the answer was the same as it may have to be for Thomas: they froze those machines in time and never updated ANYTHING. At least until a piece of hardware broke down that was no longer manufactured. One solution for the OP would be to set aside a computer that's dedicated to this one project, and NEVER update it.

Thank you.
Anniversary Windows 10 update was not the problem. When I rollback to 2016.08 the plugins V9.18 work.
 
My customer says NO CHANGE of versions. After this large digitization project (National library) the customer wants to have ONE computer with ONE version of plugins for 2 years. If something needs to be reworked later. This computer is simply retained. This computer can only have ONE version of plugins that where used over the whole project for over 3 years.
So I will roll back with one computer to 2016.08 and buy a new computer. So the customer can keep this computer with his licences.