Thank you for your reply and I wish I could

Well I have been editing my registry for many years.  Sometimes you need to do that to completely get rid of programs.  No biggie and I can still do DOS editing :).

But the problem I think is bigger than Vegas.  I believe it is a hard drive failure. Will not boot, go into safe mode or be able to roll back to an earlier state.    I find it hard to believe that Vegas could have done this, but I did get freeze ups using Vegas and it was using Vegas when it started.  But I think this coincidence.   

I have to wait until tomorrow until I can call the company I bought the computer from.  

So I am out of the editing game for awhile, just when I was on a roll.   

Dang!

Back up and running after working with a technician. I got my computer from CPU solutions in Wisconsin, I am in Michigan (prof, Michigan State 🏀 😃). I highly recommend this company. The support is fantastic.

C drive somehow got corrupted, but luckily the motherboard still recognized it and with some putzing got Win 10 back on. The symptom was that when I brought in clips, the computer would freeze up and I had to restart. I read that someone else here had this same problem with VP15 but I don't know how that turned out. It started with say bringing in four clips to the time line and then bring in the next on, freeze up. As I mentioned, I uninstalled VP16 and reinstalled but no change and got to a point where just bringing in one clip would freeze up the system and then eventually not able to boot. I asked the tech how this might happen and he said, well not sure. It is possible Windows was doing an update and did not finish properly because something might have interrupted the install. It is possible that VP might have interrupted the install, not sure but I thought I would share my experience.

In general, I had found VP16 to be a bit buggy, stopping during a render, for example. However, after I started "running as administrator" I thought this had addressed most of the "buggyness."

Great narrative. There are deep uninstall directions posted on this site. The only time in 18 years I have known of a need for a registry purge was with a brief appearance of an early 64 bit turkey, and one unsuccessful attempt of my own to rid a codec pack, which can become more entrenched than a case of bedbugs.

A much more common cause of your brief description is a rogue file, which could be anything from TS to VFR to MKV. So we ask for those properties before anything else.

That said, I suggest you read a couple of threads in their entirety, lest the road well traveled save you some time going forward. They weren't written by slouches.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/important-information-required-to-help-you--110457/

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vegas-pro-faqs-and-troubleshooting-guides--104787/

Welcome to the forum.