Low memory cannot launch program

jmudge wrote on 12/19/2003, 10:36 AM
Hi - We recently purchased VV 4.0 to run in our school in a network environment. We are having problems with users accessing the program. Some users can run the applicaiton just fine, other users get the error "low memory usage, pleaes close any other applications to increase memory." But no other applications are running. In seaking help from VV Support they pointed this problem toward the documents & settings folder on the local drive. They said it was rare but had no concrete solution except to make new user account, which seems to correct the problem. Howeve for us with ove 1000 users in a school making new user accounts is really not a solution. Has anyone else come accross this problem and if so what solution did you find?

Comments

kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 11:20 AM
Firstly, unless you have 100 licenses to use or there is a network version of the software - I wasn't under the impression that the software was designed for multiple users across a network setting as such.

You are talking about 100 licenses...or at lest 99 licenses/users too many.

But that is not my bag of worms to digest.

You can add some more troubleshooting notes: What type of server is the application installed on? Is it serving from one PC to run to 100, or is it installed on 100 PCs. Are you getting this error on one PC or on all PCs? What type of PCs are we talking about? As in P1 133 Mhz with 16 mb ram....or something slightly newer?

All good questions to help see if we can help solve your issue(s).
Jsnkc wrote on 12/19/2003, 11:45 AM
You are allowed to use the software on all the computers that you own as long as the program isn't running on more than 1 machine at a time. That was the licence last time I checked.
jmudge wrote on 12/19/2003, 11:52 AM
We purchased 41 licenses. We have it installed in 2 computer labs in the school. We have over 1000 users, obviously not all would use the program at the same time, however if my only recourse is to create new user accounts that would be crazy. These labs have Dells Optiplexe's with 2000 mgz processors, 256 megs RAM and 40 gb HDs. Randomly users get this error. I do not, and other users do not, but I have many that do...and it seems really ramdon. And it does not seem to be tied to permissions, at least not in my testing so far. And they get this error on different systems. We should be able to run concurrently since we purchased a lab license, but this seems to be an issue between Windows OS and roaming profiles and VV in a network environment. Actually I created a network account for the film club and thy run concurrently with no problems. Their account seems to be fine.
Liam_Vegas wrote on 12/19/2003, 11:58 AM
I guess you are running Vegas from a shared network drive then?

Hmm... how does Vegas figure out where to get it's default settings from?

There is a setting on the Options>Preferences which specifies where temporary files should be stored. Is there any chance this is set to the same physical location (on the network) for each user? If so... then I imagine Vegas could get thoroughly confused. If this is set to a local drive/directory (as long as it existed on every single PC) then I guess that would be ok.

I'm still unsure though of how Vegas handles itself when being run from a network drive...

In any case... I find the idea that Vegas is being used in a school environment to be a very positive step. Is this a high school or a college? In any case... I hope you get the problems resolved. I think it can only do good for the Vegas community to have some early converts to the game!
kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 11:59 AM
Jsnkc....albeit you are somewhat correct in what you recall from the licence agreement the last time you checked.....we are talking about a school and a network connection - and students - and I don't think that they have it so that only one student can use the application at a time.

And so, therefore, to wit, my question(s) remain and need to be answered if a fix is going to be forthcoming.

Again....It's not my can of worms to eat wheter their license practices are up to snuff. But it is needed to know how the application is installed and running if some form of a solution is going to be forth coming.

Hope that clears that up.

And if not....what you recall reading is:

RESTRICTIONS ON USE. You may not (a) use the Software on more than one computer at a time without purchasing additional licenses, (b) copy the Software (except for one back-up copy), (c) sublicense, lend, lease or otherwise make the Software available to any third party (on the Internet or tangible media, by broadcast or in any other manner), (d) use the Software commercially, (e) modify, adapt, or translate any part of the Software, (f) reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Software or otherwise attempt to obtain its source code, (g) remove or alter any copyright, trademark or other proprietary notice contained in the Software, or (h) use the Software in any manner not set forth in this Agreement or in the Software's documentation.
kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:02 PM
I agree with Liam....on all points.

My initial concern was how was the software running from a network install - versus being installed on every PC.

But If I read the reply correctly, there are 41 seats....and the application is installed on each PC - and each PC is hooked to the network - and the users are logging into a server with full rights to the Dell box.

Where are the user profiles located? On the network or on the local machine?

kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:05 PM
Yeah...I'm re-reading Jmudge's specs...and I really can't make heads-or-tails if we are talking about a network install, or if it is installed on 41 boxes.

Can you help clear that up?

Thanx
pelladon wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:11 PM
Are you talking about Win2k? That OS is picky about allowing applications to work amongst regular users. You might have to give accounts to students or try making a generic "power user" account, see if that works.
kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:15 PM
Pelladon, I'm not sure which operating system you are talking about - but the Win2K that I have been using since it (pretty much) first came out hasn't had any problems as such.

That is....I mean, I was weaned on NT...so Win2K is easy to manipulate and easy to understand how the user accounts work - I have never....and I do mean never - had a problem with the OS being picky about allowing applications to work amongs regular users.

Do it all the time.
pelladon wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:31 PM
On a network you can get really wierd stuff, like some users not being able to access programs, while others can. The problem that we had were usually with older apps, which is why we granted power user permissions to users. They had to run those apps.

However, on second thought, what jmudge might want to check is if any memory resident programs (like virus scanners) may be having any effect.

kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:40 PM
Pelladon.....I see what you are saying - but again, it's not a problem.

And that may be what one of the issues is that jmudge is having - without some more specific information my first guess is that it is having some issue with profiles.

For applications as such (network apps) it should really be installed under all users (versus by profile). But...I wasn't aware that this particular application was designed to run via the network.
pelladon wrote on 12/19/2003, 1:41 PM
jmudge was looking for a quick fix, I just gave him a few tips. I don't know how his net is setup so I can't comment too much.

A modern app like Vegas shouldn't have problems running over the network.
kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 2:26 PM
Pelladon....yes it should. Especially if it isn't designed to be run from a network. There are all sorts of files and linked thingamagigabobs that if your PC doesn't know where they are it can't run properly.

And then, heaven forbid the application gets tied to a profile and the profile's location isn't set correctly - then cats and dogs start sleeping together - it's total anarchy! Nothing gets done and cockroaches rule the world.

But I digress.

I think we all are trying for good tips and troubleshooting - but it always helps to know if the application is even suppose to be running in the manner in which it is being run to wit therefore coitus interuptus - the network.

Don't mind me too much though....I just like the sound of the way I type.

:-)
Liam_Vegas wrote on 12/19/2003, 2:35 PM
So... ASSUMING... that you have installed Vegas onto the local hard drives of each of those PC's... then I would check out the Options>Preferences and make certain that the temporary files setting is referencing a standard local folder that every PC has. By default it looks to me like this is setup to point to a folder within the users "Documents" area which could be rather different when you are using a network/login setup (just a guess).

Anyway... if I were you... I would just check out what the temporary folder is setup as on the PC's (and users) that work and the ones that don't.

[EDIT}... Although.... I guess that if you cannot even launch Vegas on some accounts then you would hardly be able to check what the settings are in any case... DARN. Maybe on those machines/accounts that have a problem try launching Vegas while holding down "ctrl+shift" keys as that re-sets all the optins / settings back to default... which might just get it to work.

Good Luck!

JackW wrote on 12/20/2003, 12:30 PM
Sounds like you're having a file management problem. My system drive, which holds the OS and the application files for Vegas, Cool Edit and a graphics editor, is 80 gig; the two data drives, which old all audio and video files, are 120 gig each. It doesn't take a lot of video to fill up an 80 gig drive.

I've gotten this same error message once or twice on my computer because I have misdirected files to the Vegas application directory on the system hard drive and have loaded the hard drive to nearly full with "tmp" and "avi" files. It's important to set the "Temp" directory to your data drive, not to the Vegas directory on your system drive, especially if, as you indicate in your post, the system drive is quite small.

This may be what's happening to your system.

pelladon wrote on 12/28/2003, 10:00 PM
Oh wow, I just remembered about NT's roaming profiles.

When you log in with a roaming profile, the system looks for your profile on the local system disk. If it doesn't find it or if it's older, it will download your profile from the server to the local system partition.

When you have a lot of different people logging onto the same machine, their roaming profiles would get copied onto that machine, filling the TEMP dir. Guess what happens if user n+1 logs in, and the machine tries to download his profile BUT there's no disk space left. The local machine gives a error mesg, and kicks the user off. This was a common thing with NT4.

Definitely check disk space.
Slimicus wrote on 1/3/2004, 8:32 AM
I had this exact same problem until I just fixed it now... I have a similar environment, where my computer has the folders redirected to a server.. here's my setup

Vegas is installed local
My hard drive is 160GB RAID 0 SATA drive set (disk space isn't an issue)
My Profile show's up as roaming in the profiles section of the my computer properties
I'm using windows xp on a 2000 domain with active directory and there was a policy in place to redirect my desktop, my docs, my pics, and my app data to the server..

I'm fairly certain even though the error says there's not enough memory it has nothing to do with memory, that's just the error message that happens to show up.. . I started vegas and after the splash screen, it errors out, popping up the error message box. Once you press "Ok", the program ends..

I left the error message on the screen and started Process Explorer NT (from www.sysinternals.com, it's free, btw) and noticed a handle open to the redirected folder on my server... it was the desktop folder.

I removed the redirection policies for that folder and the desktop folder and copied them back to my local machine and logged out and logged back in but they were still redirected... apparently, the policy isn't resettting them to their defaults once their removed (and yes, I know there's an option to have them do that in that policy, but that was already set and it didn't work)

So I changed the shell folder locations back to the documents and settings folder on my local hard drive under the following two keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders

Values: AppData, Desktop

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

Values: AppData, Desktop

Those two values in each of those keys had the server's name and redirected folder in there until I changed em back to my c drive.

Logged out and logged back in and now Vegas works fine. It seems Vegas video has a problem with a redirected desktop and/or redirected AppData folder.

I hope this helps,
Jimmy