I reallly don't think it is the soundcard, but I did try different buffer settings and nothing noticable changed.
I tried different VEP buffers again to no noticeable change.
Win7 and OS X 10.11.3
I tried to eliminate different plug ins and loading only certain slaves up - nothing seems to change. It seems to be dependant upon how many instances I load up - the more I load, the slower it gets. The problem definitely is VEPro 6 as everything works fine when it isn't loaded up, and when I unload everything, and then just load VEPro6 instances 1 at a time, it slows down incrementally.
Also strange is that when I load up a file, the first playthrough is immediate, but thereafter it lags. Keep in mind this is not a latency issue in the standard sense - the triggering of samples is just fine, but starting a project playing, introduces a delay before the playhead will move - almost like VEPro is cueing up the engines or something.
Does that make sense?