[Rwp] a fun Reaper crashing experience

[Patrick Perdue]

So, I've been using Reaper for about five years, regularly for a bit 
over 4, and I've never seen this one.

I'm using Reaper v4.77x64 with OSARA, and am having a fun issue wherein 
Reaper crashes almost every time I leave it's main window and come back.
Not quite a normal crash though.
It stops responding, so I press alt+f4 to close the window, which gives 
the normal "reaper is not responding" error.
So, after the UI goes away, reaper.exe, ReaperHost32 and 
ReaperHost64.exe are all still in the task manager. If I try to end 
reaper.exe, nothing happens. Same for ending the process tree. If I go 
to the command line and type "taskkill /im reaper.exe /f"
I get an error similar to
"The process reaper.exe with PID 1984 could not be terminated. Reason: 
an instance of this process is not running."
So, I still have this old instance of Reaper hanging around, taking up a 
bunch of memory. I can launch Reaper again, but when I do, I get errors 
about not being able to access audio and midi devices, presumably 
because the old Reaper still has access to those devices, and won't 
close properly. Even if I log out of Windows and don't restart, while 
the process is no longer running, those devices still can't be accessed, 
unless I restart Windows.

While editing a project, I've probably restarted this computer an 
average of 7 times in an hour. A bit hard to be productive like that.

If it matters, I am using bridged mode, with both 32 and 64-bit VST 
plugins. No DirectX, converted or otherwise.
Reaper even crashes sometimes when going to effects windows for tracks, 
but not consistently with one plugin. It could be that I have a bad 
something in the chain of one of the tracks in this project, which is 
causing Reaper to flop over, but I haven't been able to figure out if 
that's the case, because it crashes when I try.

Has anyone ever seen this particular issue, or something like it?
I realize that, without the exact combination of hardware, software and 
project I'm using, probably no one will be able to replicate this 
exactly, but I'd sure love to have a clue about why this is happening.