Okay, heres the deal. Had a AMD fx-55 with 2 gigs ram and a raptor 75 gig drive. Was using 2 Nvidia 7800 GTX in sli on a asus a8n32 deluxe motherboard. When using movie studio platinum 6.0b and capturing HD video off a sony HVR-A1U I could not get the preview window to display anything. It captured okay (some dropped frames) and when I played the video from the timeline it showed up just fine in the preview window. Looking at the xp performance monitor I showed a cpu usage of around 80%. I figured the cpu utilization was too high for the preview window to work and left it at that. Now, I installed movie studio platinum to my new laptop (dual core 2 ghz, 2 gigs ram with a seagate 7200 rpm sata drive, x800 video card). The machine captures perfectly with no problems in the preview window. The cpu utilization is around 50-60 %.
A laptop is by no means a video editing machine, so I decided to build a new desktop. Put together a quad core opteron 2.6ghz with 4 gigs ram, Ultra 320 Maxtor 15k scsi hard drive, ATI X1800 XTX video card and xp pro. Installed movie studio platinum and wouldnt you know it, NO DAMN PREVIEW WINDOW. I cant figure out whats wrong. I am capturing using the 1080i-60 template and have tried the preview window on auto, best, good, etc. Nothing changes. My processor utiliztion while capturing was around 15%. Anyone have any ideas?

Geoff

ps> on the plus side, I can capture video in movie studio platinum, watch a movie in windows media player, download off the internet and unzip files at the same time and the processor utilization never goes above 20%. Gotta love that!