OK, this is the thing. Some months ago, while using MS 3 one day my laptop just started to take very long times to render video, so i got me a 250gb external HDD to liberate space in my internal HDD. Didn't change a bit.

So I re formated both c and D drives and reinstalled everything, including MS3. The problem was still there so I remembered that everything started around my update to Service pack 2.

I just upgraded to Vegas MS 4, not only uninstalled SP2, but again, I reformated the unit.

Now, after reinstalling everything except for SP2 the speed on the rendering looks fine but listen to this:

I have always rendered small portions of my movies and exported to MPEG2, then imported them in to movie shaker to ad some FX (you know, the bubbles, snow, the beating heart, etc) and render it again to MPEG2 and using MS again, stitch all those chapters into a whole movie.

After upgrading, reinstalling, re formating and everything, when I render the final product, all the images look blury, it is hard, very hard to know who are the people in the stills. Seems like, the longer the movie is, the worst the movie looks.

No viruses, DMA is on, so, what's wrong? could my procesor or memory got damaged somehow?

Also, before, the preview window was always smooth, now it's jumpy, sometimes sound goes on while the image freezes and it's worst in tarnsitions