VST plugin question - can't get 'em working

My old XP pc died... I've got a new one now with Vista 64. I had an older version of Reaper working on XP with a bunch of plugins (some GVST). I tried installing the 64 bit version of Reaper but it doesn't seem to recoginze any of the plugins. Thinking this might be 32bit vs 64bit thing I also installed 32 bit Reaper, unfortunately I have the same issue. I've specified my plugin directories and did a rescan but no love. Anyone have any ideas why niether version will see my plugins? (I have both versions of Reaper installed right now). I'd like to recover the old pplugins as I have a bunch of projects that used them. Thanks.

Yes, I thought it might be something like that that's why I have both Reaper (32bit) and Reaper 64 installed (on Vista 64) and niether seems to see the plugins. I don't get it.

First off, unlike freebies you'll have to reinstall most payware plugins in order to make them work (a backup of your plugin folder won't do it). Then what is your exact plugin location? If you point Reaper to a common \VSTPlugins folder, it should find all working plugins in that folder and its subfolders when you browse to that folder and hit the "clear cache and rescan directory" button. If it doesn't, the plugin DLL may sit in a sub-sub-subfolder and you probably have to add this path to the existing path.

Which version of Reaper are you using? What are the exact path names to your VST(i) folders? Any "non-standard" characters in there? Earlier versions of Reaper did not like folders with non-English characters in their names

Ok, I got it sorted out. Thanks for the replies. What I wound up doing was renaming my Reaper folder under my profile (users/me/appdata/roaming/reaper)and poof all my plugins were recognized. I think I might have tried to restore that folder from a backup so it had old junk in it from my previous installation. :-)