Actually, I'm talking about rendered and made to DVD, watching it on TV. I do have problems seeing what I've created on my computer. My playback is getting worse and worse. Don't know what's causing that.

Do a Ctrl-Alt-Del (if using Windows 2000 or XP then go to the Processes tab) and tell us how many items you see in that list.

32...taskmgr, wmtray, acrotray, msmgs, retroexpress, onetouch, versioncue tray, avgoc32, seticon, wdbtnmgr, nva tray, sychost system, wdsvc, pctspk, nvsvc,32, avgserv, alg, packethsvc, spoolsv, explorer, svchost local, svchost network, retrorun, svchost system, svchost system, lsass, services, winlogon, csrss, smss, system, system idle process.

What can I get rid of and how?

Help! Some of you guys who are really video and computer savvy, please give me some pointers on getting this right. This forum has helped me so much and I need you now!

Well, Pinnacle "endorses" a program called EndItAll (http://home.ptd.net/~don5408/toolbox/enditall/) which does a pretty good job of stopping all unnecessary tasks. Unfortunately, it appears as though EnditAll is no longer freeware because of some legal issue. However, you can still find it on http://www.docsdownloads.com/Tier1/enditall.htm.

That should take care of background tasks. But it doesn't really sound like that is causing your problem. Vegas should be able to render whatever you have regardless of the resources available (well, almost). You may have a virus/spyware/adware on your system, corrupt footage, or a corrupt version of Vegas.

Vegas renders fine. It's just that the result with the fast motion is not as clean as I would like. It's jerky and has noticeable ghosting in the movements.

For some reason, I am unable to play the effects back on my computer without hesitation in the higher quality modes. Could the background operations be causing that? So, consequently, I have to make a DVD to actually see my editing results, which gets expensive. Even Media Player has hesitations in playback. I don't know how to shut down the background operations.

Back to the fast motion editing. Do I need to resample or supersample to get smooth playback? If so, recommend some settings which have worked for you, please.

Let me see if I've got this right.
You have some camera footage of fast motion.
You've put that into Vegas and sped it up 200%.
You put it on a DVD and it looks very bad?

If the motion is full frame this is very much to be expected. What bitrate etc are you encoding to mpeg-2 at? Mpeg-2 uses temporal compression, if you have every pixel chnaging between frames then the encoder will have lots of problems, also if you get the bitrate too high then the player will have problems as well.

Supersampling will do nothing to help, it only works with generated media. You could try adding motion blur, this will smooth the motion and perhaps give the encoder more of a chance however your video will have obious motion blur. Also just how the camera was setup when you shot the footgae will have an effect as well.
Bob.