Thanks Mike. That was very helpful. 

John: one thing you might consider is Groove 3 has an excellent Battery 4 video (by Eli Kratzenburg) and Mac Pro Video (macprovideo.com) also has a couple. These may be helpful, particularly if you have an already have an account with them and don't have to spend any additional money.
 
Also I didn't mention it before but I think in some cases it seems that NI has taken some (the 'Solid' series IIRC) of the plugs that used to be required to use Guitar Rig as the host and plugged them in as fx processors (comps, eq etc.) in their instruments. I'm not 100% certain of that...
 
One additional note which I realize is completely irrelevant: Battery 4 looks very, very cool. 
 
Regards,

lol... sorry about this lads, my own stupid fault, I had a live instance of Nebula running I had forgotten about on the drum bus. Apparently battery's sample playback is problematic when confronted with high levels of PDC, and glitches a little, especially when it's on multi-outputs. Without that, my battery appears to be safe and sound.

YAY!
 
Bob Bone