[ivansc]

Just to simplify and clarify here in case you guys with problems have been missing the elephant in the room.
If Reaper is scanning vast areas of your hard drive, the first place to check is in Reaper's Options/Preferences/Plugins/VST setting window to see if, in the list of places you told reaper to scan for plugins, you accidentally added something like " C:\ " which WILL make Reaper want to scan every single file on your OS drive and attempt to load a mountain of .dll files that are NOT audio plugins.

Obviously there are other places besides the simple C:\ that are not good to scan, so think carefully about what you have showing in that list. FWIW I swipe and copy MY list and print it to a file in notepad (Windows of course) to be sure I havent overlooked a misplaced letter or punctuation.
Worth checking.