I found out why the eXT VSTi crashes. If you bypass or mute the eXT track, you can load the .ext projects saved with the standalone version. Once you unmute or disable bypass of the eXT track though, it will crash in the audio processing code. You’ll notice that your eXT projects has a master in module with both MIDI and audio connectors. If you create new projects with the VSTi version the master in only has a MIDI connector. This is because the VSTi version does not have audio inputs. Since the plugin declares it does not process input, Podium does not provide input buffers to it (for speed and memory optimization reasons), and this is why eXT crashes. If I send dummy input buffers to eXT it does not crash. You should be able to use your projects if you can substitute the master in MIDI/audio module with a master in MIDI only module, but I could not figure out how to do this.
I’ll send an email to Jørgen about this.