OK, hopefully this will help others that find this odd combination of things. When I try to open either Vegas Pro 9e or Vegas movie studio Platinum HD, both of them give me the "Vegas Pro has stopped working" (or "Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum has stopped working". In both cases, if you click on the "show problem details", it shows that the fault module is dinput8.dll (part of the direct x stuff). Running Dxdiag from the "run" prompt also crashes at that module. Windows XP, SP3. After much snooping and googling about, I came across someone else with the same issue with their USB project returning an issue with the HID from the gadget. Hmmm - I had the Microchip PicKit2 device programmer plugged in to the USB ... unplug that and the problem goes away. I have no idea why it was causing the problem (and I had not seen any other issues with that device), but thought I would post it here so if others ran into the issue they could find this info.

mikey