Audio plugins stopped working

athomasl wrote on 8/16/2007, 1:11 PM

I just upgraded to Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8.0b.
During installation it complained that it could not register the Audio plugins from the Shared-Plugins directory (sfppack1.dll, etc.)
When I run the program and try to apply a plug-in to an audio track, it complains that "Tthe plug-in could not be run. One or more components required to run this plug-in may be missing." I tried dragging sfppack1.dll to the Vegas window to manually register it, but it returns this error, "The DirectX Plug-In sfppack1.dll failed to register properly (80004005h)." I uninstalled and reinstalled Vegas and my .NET frameworks and DirectX9.0c, but I still can't use any audio effects. I can apply Video Effects.

Has anyone else had problems with plugins failing to register?
I really don't want to uninstall and reinstall XP.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 8/16/2007, 1:21 PM

Make sure you are logged in as administrator on your XP. Then, go to the audio plugins directory, open a DOS prompt there, and type this for all the dlls in that folder:

regsvr32 AUDIO_PLUGIN_NAMES.dll

See if manually registering works for you.

athomasl wrote on 8/16/2007, 2:49 PM

I tried that. I get this error popup:

LoadLibrary("sfppack1.dll") failed - this application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

I found this message in my Event Viewer:
Source: SideBySide
Description: Generate Activation Context failed for c:\progra~1\sony\shared~1\audio\sfppack1.dll. Reference error message: The operation completed successfully.

This is getting way more ugly that I can handle.
Uninstalling and reinstalling .NET or directx or Vegas did not help. Is there a Windows .dll that I am missing? I had trouble installing .net updates last week but thought I finally got it to succeed. Maybe it screwed up?

Eugenia wrote on 8/16/2007, 3:12 PM

Something is not correctly installed on your XP, or you have a virus/spyware that does not allow DLLs to register... I would either install the AVG Free Edition to check for viruses, and also the LavaSoft's free Ad-Aware SE Peronal to check for spyware.

Also, try to manually unregister the .dll files and if that works, then try to re-register them, e.g:
regsvr32 /u NAME.dll
regsvr32 NAME.dll

If that doesn't work, retry re-installing .NET, DX9 and possibly the SP2+updates. If that doesn't fix it, I am afraid you will have to re-install XP, install all its updates, and then install Vegas clean slate... My opinion is that something is not correctly installed on your XP.

athomasl wrote on 8/16/2007, 9:00 PM

No viruses or spyware.
Manually registering didn't work.
I uninstalled .net, dx9 and vegas. No luck.
I discovered the free Dependency Walker program (depends.exe). It says that sfppack1.dll depends on msvcr80.dll and dwmapi.dll which do not exist on my machine. I found some versions of those files and put them in my system32 folder, but depends.exe complained about mpr.dll, shlwapi.dll, and others.
I should have ignored the messages from Windows Update when it said I needed to update my .net components. I think that's when all this began, if not when I installed version 8.0a. It might be time for me to go buy a Windows Vista desktop just for video editing -- that might save me a lot of grief instead of reinstalling XP and all my apps on this machine.

Eugenia wrote on 8/16/2007, 9:31 PM

I would recommend against Vista. It has its own issues, including issues related to HD.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135814-c,windowsbugs/article.html
So, I find it very interesting that you don't have msvcr80.dll. If you indeed missing such a supporting library and it's too much of work to get them one by one, reinstall XP. I would personally do that instead of going Vista and do video work there.

athomasl wrote on 8/17/2007, 7:58 AM

I got it working! :-)

I uninstalled .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0, and .NET 3.0. I found a utility, dotnetfx_cleanup_tool, which supposedly cleans up more. I saw that I had two listings for Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable in my Add/Remove programs. I deleted them both. At this point I found I still had some msvcr80.dll files in WinSxS directories. I deleted the directories and manifests for *MFC* and *CPlusPlus* and *CRT* under that directory. I rebooted and installed only .NET 2.0, then re-installed VMS (which re-installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 ). Now it all works. Hooray!

I'm going to stay away from .NET 3.0 for now.

ADB wrote on 8/20/2007, 12:17 AM

Anthony,

I've just noticed that I have three versions of msvcr80.dll in WinSxS
8.00.50727.163
8.00.50727.42
8.00.50727.762

Are these similar to what you had ?

ADB wrote on 8/22/2007, 8:46 PM

I've just tried to upgrade to 8.0b and get the same error as in the original post ... "failed to register" sfppack1.dll etc.

However, I had already uninstalled and cleaned up .NET framework using the clean tool, and re-installed 2.0.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

ADB wrote on 8/22/2007, 9:27 PM

For anyone else who encounters this problem, the key step is to uninstal Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable before re-installing VMS. I'm up and running again now.

Paul Mead wrote on 8/23/2007, 10:49 AM

And for those who don't know what a "redistributable" is, go to this page on the Microsoft website. The new Microsoft 8.0 manifest stuff can be really tricky.