Plasma Materials create 'Entire Animation' helper!

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Helping a friend with an ongoing project, I find their .max file is loaded with many hundreds of helper nodes labelled "Entire Animation".


And indeed, whenever I add a new Plasma material, I find that an additional 'Entire Animation' node has been added as well.
The file is now so overstuffed with these things that I'm now seeing this error message when a new Plasma material is created:

(The humor in the error message indicates it's a Cyan internal note!)

I've tried selecting these in the Selection Floater and deleting them, with variably disastrous results.

At one point, I thought these helpers were being creating through the Plasma material's Animation checkoff for the 'Loop' function. But after going through about a hundred materials and unchecking their unnecessary 'Loop' option, the number of 'Entire Animation' nodes had not decreased (possibly once they're created, they aren't removed when the connection is eliminated?)

And I've tried the trick of Merging all the Age's assets into a new blank file, which will often clean up unused materials and nodes. Of course, doing this at Max level won't import Plasma functionality. But while using the Plasma Merge function does seem to clean up the worst of the 'Entire Animation' nodes, I now get frequent crashes from the resulting .max file.

Okay, so essentially, what I'm asking is:
- Has anyone else seen this unwanted creation of 'Entire Animation' nodes when Plasma materials are created?
- And do you have any idea what setting is causing this to happen?

I haven't been able to find the cause!