Yes, up until this incident, it had gotten much stabler these past two years. But this was a pretty major hiccup, and it's pretty seriously thrown me off-schedule for a short-term deliverable. I have been avoiding other software updates of late, but felt this one necessary as it appeared to be a prerequisite for Arturia CS80V2 running. As it turns out, it was sufficient to do the late August update (my running copy before last night was slightly earlier than that version and so didn't know about CS80V2).
I most certainly will avoid any further eLicenser updates until a new computer. I simply thought it best to do the challenge/response-to-dongle conversion on CS80 now rather than later, as it might get too tricky to do that as part of a computer switch. The computer switch for that product should go smoothly now that the license is on a dongle vs. challenge/response.
As for VSL load time, not all of that is dongle license lookup; some of it is disc scanning for the actual installed libraries. Yet both seem faster these past few months, by good measure. So perhaps I had a false sense of security about eLicneser updates before last night's debacle, based on recent track history (before the Steinberg takeover and the new GUI, which I am once again not using since the late August version pre-dates the new Steinberg version of the GUI and the licenser procedures (which have changed)).