Thought Audition was the ANSWER but Accusonus ERA plugins crash it

I have no idea why it would crash with that plugin, but there are a couple of points to make; firstly, Audition has always been slightly notorious for not suffering some plugins. Even Waves fell foul of this at one point and they had to do a bit of a rewrite to keep them strictly within the VST guidlines - the shortcuts that work with a lot of other software simply don't with Audition. Not saying that this is definitely what's happened - just that it's not unknown. It's always difficult dealing with this, because invariably Adobe blames the plugin, and the plugin manufacturer blames Adobe. I don't know how you resolve this...

The second thing is that Audition's NR actually works pretty well. Have you thought or tried using that instead? The best form of it is the process-based one, applied in two or three passes, a fresh sample at different FFT sizes each time, and only a small amount taken off.