When I'm in Vegas and I go to render a project by choosing "Render As" from the file menu it takes at least 3-4 minutes to open. During that time, Vegas becomes unresponsive and damn near maxes out the CPU. It doesn't matter what I put on the timeline, it still happens.
Vegas does normally boot in a reasonalbe amount of time though.
Do you have a large number of events on the timeline (1,000 or more)?
How long is your project? Is it more than ten hours?
If you open Vegas, start a new project, and put a ten second video clip on the timeline, when you click on Render As, does it still take a long time?
One suggestion would be to re-boot the computer, go to the TEMP directory (usually C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, unless you changed it) and delete all the files there. You might also go to the Control Panel, and open the Internet Options icon. On the "General" tab, in the "Temporary Internet Files" section, click on the "Delete Files" tab, then check the "Delete all offline content" box and click on OK. This may take a minute or more to delete the thousands of files that may have accumulated. Finally, while you are cleaning house, empty your recycle bin.
If you haven't done any of this for awhile, this can delete thousands, even tens of thousands, of files. The overhead of searching through these files can cause the computer to slow down, although usually not as much as what you report. Also, this was a bigger problem with older FAT file systems than with NTFS, but many new computers still ship with their disks formatted as FAT32, so this may be an issue for you.
Usually a slow dialog box is due to it trying to get to a resource and it taking a long time to access it. A logical resource would be a harddrive.
Another issue would be if you have two hard drives and one of them has gone to sleep. I know that whenever I access my D drive after no use for a while, I need to wait for it to spin up.
I hope a "sleeping" drive doesn't need 3-4 minutes to wake up... unless it was partying the night before.
The usual suspects. Drive being accessed needs to be defragged, one or more files on the drive is corrupt, in use by another application,perhaps something you may have overlooked is the NUMBER of files on the drive being accessed. I have lots of image files. They all are arranged in folders via Windows Explorer. A few of the folders have thousands of files, it takes Photoshop a good while to display a file list too, but nowhere near minutes, I'm talking maybe 10 seconds or so.
Try setting up a new folder. Just call it junk or something. Change Vegas so it points to the new folder for saving renders. See if still takes forever.
I downloaded the Vegas 6 demo and I didn't have anymore problemswith tghe "REnder as" box until I launched Vegas 5 again. Then all of a sudden Vegas 6 started having the same problem.
I defragged the hard drive completely and it's still having problems. Interstingly enough, if I wait for the "Render As" box to open then later in the same editing session I can open the "Render As" without experincing any problems. Soon as I close that instance of Vegas the problems start again though.
OT:
I just got this weird crash. I imported about a minute of DV footage cut it up really quick, no effects and one crossfade... I adjsted the amount of ram to 500 instead of 16mb's (I have one gig or ram)
then Vegas crashed the next time I tried to playback the timeline. It played for a couple seconds then it just crashed.