Vegas 5 launches ntvdm.exe

stanman wrote on 7/29/2004, 5:22 PM
Athlon 64 3200+ 1 GB DDR 400 Ram ASUS K8V Motherboard Seagate SATA Drives. Win XP Pro

When I launch Vegas 5 a process is started - ntvdm.exe and its child wowexec.exe. Vegas 5 runs perfectly. However, closing down Vegas leaves ntvdm and wowexec still running. This apparently causes Vegas 5 to hang at the splash screen upon subsequent launches. Manually stopping the ntvdm process (or a reboot, of course) allows a successful Vegas 5 launch. No such problem exists with Vegas 4. Any advice??

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/29/2004, 5:33 PM
Is that what it is? I've been wondering why Vegas 5 hangs on launch now and then. That would explain it.

VisualBasic 6 also launches ntvdm.exe and wowexec.exe. It doesn't seem to hang if these are already running though. The other odd thing is that it didn't start doing this until after i installed Vegas 5.

Advice? Hmmmm. Dunno. Lately i've been keeping task manager running (minimized) most of the time so it's always handy for killing things off.
rs170a wrote on 7/29/2004, 6:30 PM
I'll quote Blues_Jam's response in the recent thread "V5 veeerrry sloow to start up..." on the same problem.
Hope it helps you.

Mike

Blues_Jam
It would appear that I have just solved this problem for my own system. I discovered that I had a different version of the twain_32.dll in my WINDOWS/SYSTEM32 folder than in my Windows protected DLL cache and WINDOWS folders. The first one was 76K bytes and was listed as "TWAIN_32.DLL" ( all caps). The other 2 files were 46K bytes, listed as "twain_32.dll" (small letters), and have a more recent date associated.

I have a Cannon scanner and found the 76KB "TWAIN_32.DLL" in the CanoScan folder. I replaced the 76KB TWAIN_32.DLL in the WINDOWS/SYSTEM32 folder with the 46KB twain_32.dll. You will probably need administrator rights if you try this yourself.

Though I have not THOUROGHLY tested everything related to TWAIN or WIA, this has solved my Vegas 5 startup problems and my scanner still works in Photoshop.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/29/2004, 6:41 PM
according to Task List Programs (http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
) ntvdm is 16-bit/DOS support. Wowexec is used for the same thing.

It's possible (technically not) that Vegas 5 has some 16-bit or Win9x/NT4 code in it (which is why it would run those things).

This is probley an issue for tech support. :) Maybe the directX plugins are still in old code.
stanman wrote on 7/29/2004, 7:20 PM
That was the culprit - an old Twain_32DLL from 1996. Where does such an old piece of code come from? I don't have a scanner installed on this machine so is it actually part of Windows XP??!!!

Many thanks, RS170A for pointing me in the right direction and a very big thank you to Blues_Jam and all the others for solving this mystery.
BJ_M wrote on 7/29/2004, 7:21 PM
this will not help much -- but neither ntvdm or any wowexec starts up when i launch vegas 5 or shut it down or any time in between ..

kinda strange ....
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/29/2004, 8:14 PM
then maybe an older file is being run.

oopes. Stan just said the old twain file was loading & that was the problem. :)
Blues_Jam wrote on 7/29/2004, 8:54 PM
"This is probley an issue for tech support. "

Tech support is aware of the problem and now has a copy of the offending .DLL. This is the first post I have seen regarding this problem since V5.0b so I thought they may have fixed it... guess not yet.

They may not be able to fix it. How can they anticipate what changes might be made by some other company when they replace WINDOWS code with their own (for whatever dumb reason)? This issue may end up being a note in a README file. Let's see now... when was the last time I read a README file???

Blues
MJhig wrote on 7/29/2004, 9:30 PM
Sidenote;

TWAIN = Technology Without An Interesting Name

MJ
Blues_Jam wrote on 7/29/2004, 10:24 PM
"TWAIN = Technology Without An Interesting Name"

hehehe.....
And if you think he's joking... think again!

Blues
jaegersing wrote on 7/29/2004, 10:49 PM
This is what I found on TWAIN at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=twain:

"The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West"
- "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the
difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal
computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more
distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym,
and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were
selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting
Name" continues to haunt the standard."

Richard Hunter
jhc wrote on 8/4/2004, 10:18 PM
Wow -- talk about timing!

I just encountered this problem within the last 24 hours and it was driving me crazy.

The problem is I did a number of things during that time that made it hard to pinpoint the problem. One of the things I did, was uninstall Norton Personal Firewall and right away, I started to get an error every time I loaded Vegas -- the system would complain that it had a problem loading a 16-bit device driver. This issue is caused by Symantec's uninstall not cleaning up after itself properly (it leaves LiveUpdate around) and is documented in a KB article on their web site. Even after going through the steps to fix the issue, Vegas was slow to start and would hang on subsequent attempts to load it.

I searched the web for a bit tonight and in a last fit of desperation, I came here and did a search.

Yup -- my twain driver was replaced with a 16 bit version!

In my case, I know who the culprit is: ACDSee 6.0. I installed this yesterday and am sure that is what installed the 16 bit TWAIN driver.

Thanks so much for posting the solution here!

Jonathan