I updated to pigments 3.5 using the Arturia Software Center (ASC). Since I had pigments 3.2 I thought this is a minor update with full backwards compatibility. I only expect breaking changes for major updates.
After updating, I opened ableton live which told me that the pigments plugins is incompatible with the version of live. In hindsight I believe what happened is that I was using a vst2 version of pigments which got overwritten with a vst3 version. I think at this point I already lost all tracks using pigments in all my productions.
I looked at installing older versions of pigments which is not possible from ASC. Found some comment which said that the Downloads&Manuals section on the Arturia website has links to older version of the software. I went to the Arturia website and clicked the Downloads&Manuals link in the support section. Nothing happens. The link is broken.
I go back to the ASC and click the reinstall button for pigments. During installation, the ASC presents me with the login screen where I have to enter my user name and password. I do that and click the login button. The ASC shows me the spinner and nothing else happens for about 10 minutes. I decide to kill the app using the task manager. Starting the ASC again does not work. The app doesn't show. I restart my machine. Again, starting the ASC does not work. Nothing happens.
I uninstall the ASC and reinstall it again. The app works again and after logging in, I reinstall pigments one more time.
Now the pigments dll in my vst2 plugin directory is gone and ableton live now does not complain about the plugin version being incompatbile anymore. It now
complains that it can't find the plugin at all.
In all the places where I used pigments in my productions it won't be able to find the plugin. With that, the settings are lost as well. Further I lost all my self-made presets. I lost hundreds of hours of work.