Well today was fairly "spike" free. The only thing happening now is a small dropout every 20 mins or so. I can't see the CPU spiking like it was before but all channels of VEP stop playing for about .5 sec.
Annoying but I will keep trying to solve this. At the moment I'm thinking it has to be related to the multithread preferences in both VEP and Kontakt.
Although if I wasn't using Kontakt I think I could have the multithreading selected in VEP and have no problems.
Yes the printer is now on the Gigabit switch and only one port of the slave is being used.