Re-posting as my previous post got scrubbed - sorry, Thunderbird is convinced Pd-list archives are rich HTML. Doh. ;)
Anyway, I understand now - Chris is complaining generally about stability, not about vst~. It's troubling, but he's not going into specifics, so it's hard to know how to respond. I am genuinely curious about what's causing his troubles; I suspect it isn't his imagination, so that makes me wonder what the cause is.
As for the UI - well, I think everyone's aware of the situation there.
For audio interface setting persistence, I see that is now improved in Pd-extended; don't know if that's a patch worth making to Vanilla. It's a question that comes up a lot, and I don't know enough about the state of that feature, but I'd be curious to know.
Peter