As described in an earlier posting VE (2869) seemed stable after I completely uninstalled the earlier version (2779), its components, preferences and receipts. This happy state of affairs did not continue: this morning, I attempted to open the file I had had been working on yesterday - - in which VE was instantiated as plugin in Logic 8.0.1. The file crashed in the middle of launch. Repairing permissions did not help, rebooting did not help.
What did help was uninstalling VE 2869 in the manner stated above, rebooting the computer and reinstalling VE 2779. The file opened, but,as one would expect when the preferences have been trashed, the matrices in VE had to be loaded again and their parameters set to the correct values. This is the first version of VE that has exhibited this kind of instability on my system when run under OS 10.4.11. Perhaps someone at VSL would like to comment...