I'm going to be honest in that I didn't have a back up set up yet. Just recently bought the computer and was dumb in not focusing on that first. Trust me, I'll be setting one up from now on. I have the Mac mini, 16 gigs of ram, m1 chip, running Big Sur 11.2.3. I'm using a presonus 24c interface.
I tried changing to internal audio with no luck just now. I'll look into resetting the nvram. Thanks for some extra ideas. I can open a new project and it lets me save and reopen using superior drummer 3 and brainworx plugins like I had in these others projects. It's like the update just messed something up in a few of the project files so that they won't open unless the audio driver is turned off. But once I open them and turn back on the audio driver, it'll only let me use everything except the 3rd party plugins.