Reaper Crashes... pretty much always

Hi, I happily purchased a Reaper license last week and for awhile I had been enjoying it and getting a lot of work done. However, it would occasionally crash as I tried to open a project. Also, every time I closed Reaper it would said "Reaper has stopped working," which wasn't a big deal but it was not normal behavior. Then today I could get no sound from playback. Now I can't open one project without Reaper freezing and I just want a solution. I have tried restarting my computer and reinstalling Reaper several times. I would appreciate any suggestions very much!

first thing is to try opening your project with fx offline -

gwok - can you please elaborate? I'm a noob and have also had some quirky things happen on loading that I think could be FX related. In one instance, the audio "mangler" had a very different sound than when I had last saved. Closing and reopening the project resolved the issue. Are you suggesting to toggle off the FX before saving and then fire up the chains once the project is loaded? With all those .dlls, I could see where driver traffic could get a bit congested. Thanks! - EZ

open an Rpp from the file menu, and at the bottom of the "open" window you should see "open with fx offline" or somethin to that effect

It was actually working well tonight until I tried to open a different project. Now I can't even open the project without effects. It just crashes.

one of your fx is crashing (as usual... so many fx are unstable as heck). open the reaper options, select 'plug-ins' on the left, and set VST firewalling/bridging mode to 'in dedicated process per plugin'. it'll stop crashing.

There's also a chance it may be a buggy audio driver. Try changing that to a different driver that's also on your system (like a basic WDM driver) to see if the problem goes away.