Alain:
Everything worked well after I installed the Syncrosoft update. However, the next day, when I launched VE (2869) as a standalone it froze after launch. I then rebuilt the startup disk's directory with Alsoft's DiskWarrior 4. DiskWarrior claimed to have found only one problem which it reported as follows: "Incorrect values in the Volume Information were repaired." (In my experience, DiskWarrior seems not report everything that it does - as there have been a number of times when somethig was wrong and DiskWarrior did not report finding anything, but the problem, nevertheless, disappeared after the directory was rebuilt.)
Subsequent to rebuilding the directory with DiskWarrior, VE (2869) has functioned without incident (except that the license checking procedure takes a little longer than usual.)