Interesting to read this post - similar to some of mine. I have had to revert back to 8.0c entirely after have a few months where 8.1 actually worked on my 64 bit machine for a while, though with some crash-with-rendering issues that I solved by pre-rendering portions to AVI's for parts of the timeline that were likely to lead to crashes (jpg's and some video effects).

I hope they patch 8.1 to 8.2 before releasing 9. I'd hate to upgrade and have a more defective product...

Mike