[Darryl Ramm]

Not surprisingly the computer can count plugin files for you...

> cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Avid\Audio\Plug-Ins
> dir /B *.aaxplugin | find /c /v ""

(and yes Windows drives me nuts with how awful the shells and user commands are...)

Useful stuff is missing here. Like what exactly happens with a crash. Does the whole computer become slow/flakey or just Pro Tools? Are there any error message?

And if you really have a incredibly large number of plugin files then running a system with only 16GB or memory might not be a good idea. How many VI plugins are trying to cache samples? Or how many different plugins might just be sloppy with memory use or have memory leaks etc. Software "running slow then crashing..." is a possible sign of a memory leak, especially if it affects the whole computer. While memory use gets complicated the computer can give you a basic idea what is going in. Have Resource Monitor open while running Pro Tools and look at the memory stats... start with what Free memory shows.

What does the Windows event log show happening when Pro Tools crashes?

I also can't follow what troubleshooting has been done... it's quite likely there are plugin compatibility issues, so doing things like a binary walk of removing and putting back half the plugins and keep going doing that in halves does not help isolate problems? To do that well with so many plugins you are going to have to write bat files to automate this. If you really want to have as much stuff installed as you claim you are going to need to be willing to spend time debugging stuff, and hopefully technically able to write bat files etc.

If you have thousands of plugins how have you checked for claimed vendor compatibility with those plugins? Issues of Pro Tools crapping out trying to load plugin and built the plugin database are unfortunatly well know and you just have to keep retrying. Try trashing prefs/databases if it makes no progress and try again. Sometimes plugins won't load and built a new database when they are incompatible, and that may be a problem with the next plugin trying to load not the one actually displayed in the splash screen.

I don't follow the comment about the Unused folder. I would be very strange to move plugins to the Unused folder on a session by session basis. If a plugin is found to be faulty/incompatible and put in the Unused folder you would not put it back at other times. If you are seeing session by session fragility here then I'd suspect either corrupt session or sessions using VIs and running your system out of memory. Again basic stuff you should be looking at.