I plead ignorance on this situation and trust your wise sounding words.
We're talking Audition development team here... it's always good to hear from him, but it doesn't happen too often, so...
I'm using the soundcard that came with my pc (a gateway 3 ghz, 3gb ram). would it be better to get a higher quality soundcard? I am using a firepod, so I think I'm bypassing the soundcard right now, right?
Not exactly bypassing, but you are certainly ignoring the internal sound as long as it's not selected. Is it an actual soundcard, or motherboard sound (AC '97 style)? If it's motherboard-based then the best thing to do is turn it off anyway - preferably in the BIOS, as far as I'm concerned!
Anyway, the only plugin I'm using now is the BBE plugin, which worked fine with the previous versions of AA (is that on the banned list?). I'm thinking of getting the uad project pak. I hope this will work with AA.
BBE shouldn't be on the banned list, AFAIK. There is another possibility though, and it's something that has happened to at least one user that I'm aware of recently. The AA2.0 effects are now by and large VST effects too, and they can quite easily corrupt themselves. So, if you end up with an internal effect that's corrupted, this could easily cause the same error to occur. The only solution at this point (and if it happens again, I'd definitely try this) is to reinstall Audition.
In principle, there shouldn't be a problem with UAD, but you always have to bear in mind with SW using dedicated hardware that everything has to co-exist happily in your machine and run at the same time, and that there have certainly been issues with some DSP-based systems in the past. The only way to have any real degree of confidence is to hear from an existing user - any takers?