Make sure you transfer your ownership for your "2nd hand " gigastudio 96. Go to gigastudio site then click on F.A.Q. there is a question about selling gigastudio to another person. It has a link to a pdf file that allows you to become the registerered owner of that copy of gigastudio. I am assuming once registered you will be able to get the updates.
I was running Gigastudio 96 when I first bought the VSL library. I have many of the other top string libraries out there, and I have to say that with the cube and giga 96 I was able to do much more than what I could do before and it sounds better. Bottom Line
I did however quickly upgrade to 160 and am even purchasing another 2nd setup already. Not because I have to, but because I have realized that I can utilize the VSL library to do things I wouldn't have been able to do before without it.
As far as troubleshooting the upgrade to 160, here is what I did to insure zero downtime knowing gigastudio has always been a hard thing to install.
I cloned my C drive using Norton ghost ( i am running XP). It created a flawless copy. I then knew that I had a drive with a working giga 96 and a drive to troubleshoot the install. It took me about a week to get the 160 upgrade to work reliably by trying different update versions. There are tech documents on tascam site about carefulling removing gigastudio and items in the registry. I found this was the only way to upgrade. When I first attempted installing 160 over 96 the install worked, but it showed registered still as a 96 so I was unable to log on to their site to get updates, so I would recommend carefully removing 96 according to their tech documentation on how to do this before installing 160.
hope this helps!
--James