Some things that might help.
Some confusion comes into play on installation locations based on how a user ticks a box upon running the installer. When this is NOT ticked, things tend to go into the AppData directory of the administrative account installing things.
I forget the exact name of the tick box…
“Install for all users on this system” or something like that.
In a nutshell, if you want content to be available to all system users, it should be in the “%SYSTEMDRIVE%\ProgramData\Steinberg\Content\VST Sound” directory.
In some cases you might find ‘shortcuts’ in your User AppData folder pointing to the above location, or vice verse.
Personally, to clean it all up, I ended up moving all of the actual vstsound archives from the various user AppData locations to the ProgramData location, and optionally deleting any of the shortcuts in “%AppData%\Steinberg\Content\VST Sound”. In short, you want to make sure the actual vstsound files are in ProgramData, otherwise permissions problems can arise if you try to use things from different user accounts.
Another thing I’ve found that seems like it might cause issues if you happen to use Cubase. Be careful not to keep backups or unzipped installers containing vstsound archives of HALion content packs in a directory that gets scanned on a regular basis via your Cubase “Mediabay”. It seems like I once had some problems when identical content got scanned twice (once by HALion itself, and again via the Cubase Mediabay). I had quite a few things in a directory on my desktop, and at the time Cubase was set so it would keep tabs on stuff kept on my desktop. Oops. When I moved all that stuff to some directory that I know the Cubase Media Bay ignores, all my problems went away. I’ve since gone through Mediabay in Cubase and asked it to ignore my Desktop and Download directories, as I like to keep things there that I’d rather Cubase not try to bag and tag as usable media.
Finally, double check that you don’t have some sort of filter set by accident in your Sonic Media Bay. Try forcing a Content rescan in Sonic.
