Had installed NI Access at work a month ago and installed multiple plugins, running them in Bitwig just fine. Yesterday got an exception in Bitwig for the Kontakt 8 vst3 plugin, saying it failed to load, returned NULL with DLL error 1114. So I launched NI Access to try and get an updated plugin.
NI Access started to load dependencies, trying to update the NTKDaemon, installed the service but fails to run it. Starts and stops a few times, then returns an error which I can cancel out of, uninstalling the NTKDaemon files, and fails to start NI Access. Successfully installed and run standalone NTKDaemon 1.16, but when I again launch NI Access it uninstalls that version and tries to upgrade and fails again.
Tried uninstalling Access and NTKDaemon. Then ran the uninstall RegTool, which throws an MS .NET "unhandled exception in your application", but which allows you to Continue. After that I can see that Access and NTKDaemon are not on the list (but the other installed NI products are still there). Then tried reinstalling Access and back to the beginning again — still fails.
Guessing there may be something in the MSVC distributable that's changed or faulting, due to the vst3 not loading. Or the work-mandated Sentinel One antivirus is being overly aggressive again. It's not logging any exceptions or alerts though. And neither Bitwig nor the NI softwares were updated or otherwise touched for over a week.
What to try next? Thanks!