Please let me know if you make any progress - I'm about ready to drop back to Premiere (yuck).

One thing today - I switched Terminal Services back to Manual and now I no longer get that odd startup error. Could there be other wierd service dependencies that VV3 requires? I have many disabled (WinXP Pro).

Some delayed answers:

1) Are you using SF Vidcap to capture DV, y/n?

n - Vidcap inexplicably throws away audio channels 3&4 so I use SCLive to capture type 2 DV.

2) Captured DV , untouched by Vegas, plays back smoothly y/n?

Not a y/n answer. Sometimes. But the spiral transition test I did before is pretty consistently jerky.

3) You are rendering/prerendering using the unmodified DV template, y/n?

y, but when this happens I've tried every mod I can think of. Best I can do is minimize it.

4) Your renders and prerenders are saved to the same drive as the captured media, y/n? (meaning, are the renders being saved to a slower drive, perhaps by accident?)

y , although I just now tried the spiral test and it's as bad on any drive.

5) Do you have "Ignore 3rd party DV codecs" checked in general prefs?

y, although I've tried forcing the msdv codec to no effect.