can't start Movie Studio 12 - directX plugin crash

MikeTO wrote on 6/29/2013, 4:38 PM
Hi,

After being impressed with Vegas Movie Studio at a friend's place, I bought the Imagination Studio 4 suite last week.

Movie Studio Platinum installed, but will not start. The splash graphic appears, a request for the admin password appears, and the progress bar gets to "Initializing DirectX plug-ins" and then it crashes. Crash details below.

I read all the FAQs and forum posts I could find, followed the suggestions and reinstalled a couple of times. No luck. I'm running:

Movie Studio 12.0 build 895
AMD Athlon 64 dual core processor
Vista Home 32 bit
2 gig RAM
directX 11
QuickTime 7.7.4
video card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 520, just upgraded to driver version 9.18.13.2018

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm at wit's end.

Mike


Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: MovieStudioPlatinum120.exe
Application Version: 12.0.0.895
Application Timestamp: 5150afa9
Fault Module Name: StackHash_d6a3
Fault Module Version: 6.0.6002.18541
Fault Module Timestamp: 4ec3e3d5
Exception Code: c0000374
Exception Offset: 000b06b7
OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3
Locale ID: 4105
Additional Information 1: d6a3
Additional Information 2: 8df079a68a0adf3b8c97755facc822c4
Additional Information 3: ed0a
Additional Information 4: 4685b457f31d191bf4a7e16371b791ad

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 6/29/2013, 5:34 PM
Our experience is that you have a rogue plugin on your system from another application. When you find the .dll, you will have to remove it by hand. "dxdiag" (a Windows system utility) "may" help you find what is on your system.
MikeTO wrote on 6/30/2013, 9:37 AM
Thanks for the suggestion. I ran DXdiag, but I don't get the "DirectX Files" tab that I see in screenshots and videos demonstrating DXdiag. I noticed in the wiki article...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DxDiag

...Starting from Windows Vista, DxDiag only shows information; it is no longer possible to test the hardware and the various DirectX components.[2]

Should the DirectX Files tab definitely be present? If not, is that proof of corruption?

I found DXTest.exe on breakthrusoftware.com, a free diagnostic. When I run it, it crashes (Unexpected exception...). Possibly that's also the result of a bad plugin?

How can I get a list of my plugins? Once I have it, how do I find a "rogue?"

I have a fair bit of software installed, but not much that is graphics intensive. I guess the relevant stuff is; VLC Media Player, a few other media players like QuickTime, an ancient Photoshop version, and no games.

The only thing I can think of trying now is taking out the GeForce video card and reverting to the built in motherboard video. Any chance that would help?

Mike
musicvid10 wrote on 6/30/2013, 10:21 AM
Other people have had to hunt for and rename .dll's one by one, on a per-application basis until the Vegas application starts. It would be nice if Vegas had a fallback routine for plugins that fail to load.

Usually it's not the major players -- it's one of those little free sound or video apps that you've forgotten about that is the culprit. I don't "think" it's your video card, but it would be good to rule it out by reinstalling / updating your graphics drivers. Sorry not to have a quick fix for you, but do let us know what you find out.
MikeTO wrote on 6/30/2013, 12:42 PM
"It would be nice if Vegas had a fallback routine for plugins that fail..." Good Lord yes!

From various postings, this seems to have plagued users for a long time. You would think the program could list each DLL it initializes and, with a try/catch block, gracefully handle errors and let you know the DLL causing the problem.

Do you work for Sony?

And should I see that "DirectX Files" tab in DXdiag?

Thanks again. Will post after I've tried removing the video card, probably tomorrow.
musicvid10 wrote on 6/30/2013, 5:18 PM
No, Sony has never asked me to work for them.
Just a general observation, people who don't have a lot of games on their system "may" have fewer errors of this type with Windows video editing programs such as Vegas. Sloppy global registration practices (that they really shouldn't do) abound, by what I've read.
MikeTO wrote on 7/3/2013, 11:17 PM
I spent an hour on the phone with tech support. He was very good, and we tried everything he could think of, including a startup parameter to ignore plugins, but nothing worked.

Just now, I downloaded a trial copy of version 11.0 and it works. Remarkable.
gpsmikey wrote on 7/6/2013, 11:15 AM
This is a long shot, but a while back I ran into this situation and finally tracked it down. If you work with PIC microprocessors and have the "PicKIT2" plugged into the usb port on your system, it will do this. Took me a while to figure out what was causing it. Unplugging the pickit fixed the startup issue for Vegas (the Pickit is a little gadget for programming and debugging PIC microprocessor circuits you have built up). If you don't have/use one of these, then "never mind" :-) The "error" messages from Sony are "somewhat" less than helpful ...

mikey