hi DG. I don't think I explained myself clearly enough. Yes I am using the 64bit version of the VE server, and therefore loading 64bit instances of Vienna Instruments, and therefore happily loading up over 10GB of VSL samples. This isn't the problem.
The problem is with the VE3 vst plugin that runs inside Cubase - that tiny dll which communicates with the sever program outside the host process. Now, if you have a 32bit host then both that host and the VE3 VST plugin dll are 32bit programs, not 64bit. Ok, so Cubase is Large Address Aware, so can use over 3GB of RAM within the host process. Because the VE3 VST plugin dll is NOT Large Address Aware, the problem arises that in a very full Cubase project, with over 1.5GB of RAM used internally within the host process, if the VE3 plugin is quite far down the loaded instrument list, and therefore during loading of a project loads after all your other samples, it needs to access a higher area of memory, will not run and therefore crashes the project.
So, you see I'm not saying that I can't load lots of samples into VE3, I'm saying that in certain high host-RAM circumstances the Vienna Ensemble VST plugin will not run inside Cubase in the first place, because it is not Large Address Aware.
It's no big deal - as I say the freeware program LAAtido patches the VE3 dll and fixes the problem. It's just that it would be nice if it ran out of the box, and of course some people out there will not understand this problem or know how to fix it. They will just find their host crashing on loading projects and not know why.