Just discovered this after about 2 hours of debugging. Observed this behavior on two different machines running XP Home in Vegas 3.0c, 4.0c and 4.0d.
When you have a text event (could be any event I suppose) on which the Linear Blur changes from an angle of 0.0 to some angle less than 1 (0.357, 0.099, etc.), Vegas crashes rendering the event. See veg
here.
Workaround is to use angles greater than or equal to 1.
I didn't need (why would you?) to use such a small angle. I'm guessing I fat-fingered the angle or something to set it to such a strange value.
Anyway, if your Linear Blurs suddenly start crashing, might make sure the angles are kosher.
David