Vegas + Rundll32 + additional plug-ins = BOOM?

bStro wrote on 1/30/2009, 4:57 PM
System's been running slow, so I 1) replaced my 512MB SDRAM with 1GB DDR SDRAM (I'm still behind the times, but this best my old motherboard will do) and 2) uninstalled a bunch of programs I don't use anymore, and 3) deleted a mess of files (nothing in the Sony hierarchy).

And now Vegas Pro 8 won't start.

It bombs when it gets to "Querying additional plug-in interfaces." Specifically, I get the infamously unhelpful "The memory could not be read" error message box with the title bar citing rundll32.exe. All other programs, so far, seem to run okay -- including Vegas 6. Reinstalling Vegas Pro 8.0c didn't help.

Only thing I could think of is that I uninstalled Movie Looks (the one that came with Vegas 5, I think), but reinstalling that didn't allow Vegas 8 to run either. When I run Vegas 6, Movie Looks is available.

Oh, AND I download Microsoft's memory diagnostic tool in case it really was the new RAM, and it found nothing wrong.

Next step, anyone?

Windows XP Pro SP2, AMD Athlon, 1GB RAM, no apps or processes running that weren't running the last time I was able to run V8 successfully, which I believe was yesterday.

Thanks,
Rob

Comments

Himanshu wrote on 1/31/2009, 3:24 PM
Download Process Monitor from Microsoft. Run it, set it to monitor the Vegas executable and see what Vegas is doing/looking for when it hangs.
bStro wrote on 2/2/2009, 2:06 PM
Thanks for the tip! Looks like a very useful app...

But, for the most part, the results just confused me more. Nothing seemed to go wrong according to Process Monitor other than the relevant processes deciding to exit -- All "Results" right before the crash said "Success."

What I find odd is this: When I couldn't determine what happened before the crash on this PC, I decided to run Process Monitor on another PC while launching Vegas 8 (successfully) there so I could see what happens right before and right after the same point. The baffling thing is that on the PC where it runs okay, only vegas80.exe is involved in loading Vegas. On the PC where it bombs, the vegas80.exe process starts another process -- rundll32.exe. That does a bunch of things, mostly to do with plug-ins, and eventually crashes giving me the "memory could not be read" error.

Why rundll32 was being called on this PC but not the other one, I don't know. And couldn't figure out. After trying many, many other methods, I finally uninstalled Vegas 8 (again) and deleted the Setup files (again). Then I went through the registry and plucked out every reference to Vegas 8 I could find (new) and reinstalled Vegas 8.0 from my original install disc. This time, I got the same error at the same point, but Vegas continued loading after I hit "OK." The next time I ran it, I didn't even get the error (and Process Monitor doesn't show it starting rundll32 anymore).

Finally, I reinstalled 8.0c over that, and it seems to be running okay again.

Weird.

Rob