Vegas Pro 11 Clean Install.

[Stephen Mann]

First, Unmanaged Exception is almost always a driver error. Reinstalling Vegas won’t fix driver problems. Have you always had nVidia on this PC or did it have an ATI display adapter at one time? Have you changed other hardware?

Are any of the devices in Device Manager marked with a yellow “!”?

You will only have the MS SQL server process installed if you are using the Media Manager.

Try this, hold Ctrl + Shift while starting Vegas to reset all preferences and delete cached data prior to loading the program. If you have recently installed new hardware (especially a new graphics card), this is necessary because Vegas may be loading settings for your old hardware.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Paul Doss]

Thank you Steve for taking the time to reply. The nVidia is the only thing that has been in this machine since built in Jan 2012. I’ve not added any hardware at all. No yellow “!” in device manager.

I rarely had any crashes until the last week or two. It seems they became more and more frequent until I was having to save after every move I made.

I tried your suggestion of holding down ctr/delete and checked the delete cached data box. I was able to do maybe 6 actions before it stopped responding. Same error message.

Thanks for the suggestions and information. I am learning more and more what the problem isn’t, but getting really stressed over the 2 projects that are waiting to be finished up.

[John Rofrano]

Just a wild guess but when you say that things got worse over time that usually points to file system corruption which is one of the only computer problems that degrades over time as it gets more and more corrupt. I would run CHKDSK /F on your hard drives and have it fix any errors automatically just to be sure.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Stephen Mann]

Chkdsk checks the file structure on the drive, but problems there usually cascade all over your software landscape pretty fast. Sfc /scannow (in windows run) supposedly scans the system files for integrity, but in all the years I have been into PC’s I have never seen sfc find anything wrong.

This is just a band-aid until you find your problem driver. Autosaver will automatically hit CTRL-S for you no matter what you’re doing. You can set it to 10 or 15 seconds so if you do have a crash, you don’t have far to go to recover.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[John Rofrano]

[Stephen Mann] “Chkdsk checks the file structure on the drive, but problems there usually cascade all over your software landscape pretty fast.”

I’m thinking if the system locked up while Vegas had some files open and you did a hard reboot, only the files that Vegas was using would have possible corruption. I just spent a week debugging a problem on my daughter’s laptop and there were very specific files that were experiencing corruption and all other files were fine. It turns out, her hard drive was failing and after a week of trying to clear up the corruption, the drive died! But I ran chkdsk several times and it definitely checks files and descriptors and found things that were wrong and corrected them and placed them into a FOUND.000 folder. I figure it’s worth a shot.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Stephen Mann]

The way that FAT and NTFS works is that each file is broken into chunks called clusters. As the data fills one cluster then the O/S writes a pointer to the next cluster then starts putting the next chunk into the next cluster. This is repeated until the file’s contents are all written. The last cluster is terminated with a lot of zeros to finish filling the cluster. Chkdsk makes sure that a file can be navigated from cluster to cluster. If it can’t because of a bad cluster, then Chkdsk will attempt to reconstruct the data (there’s some error-correction built in), and if successful, it will then write a new file with the suffix .chk. Chkdsk also looks for cases where two files have the same target cluster in their chain. I haven’t seen those since the days of FAT32. There are other things that can go wrong with a file cluster chain that chkdsk can find, but not always fix. I think that the SMART utility does more, but SMART won’t rebuild a file structure.

As you noticed in your example, once chkdsk started reporting failures a complete drive failure wasn’t far behind.

Incidentally, the filename is in the first cluster. When you erase a file, all you are really doing is changing the first character of the filename to a null. (Not to be confused with moving the file to the recycle bin which is another topic). Unerase programs only need to find that null first character, and if the program can find the end of the file, then an unerase is easy. If you have written something to the drive and used one of the clusters formerly used by the erased file, then recovery is pretty much impossible.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Paul Doss]

Thanks for the reply John! I ran CHKDSK /F and I was able to go 30-45 minutes without problem. Really thought the problem might be fixed. I was adding an audio FX when it quit responding. After opening it back up it only went 5 minutes or so before quitting.

Strange that it did seem to make a difference but not a complete fix. Thanks again.

[Paul Doss]

Thanks Stephen Autosaver is a handy tool when faced with this kind of problem.

[Paul Doss]

Still not responding but it’s not happening near as often.

Another strange thing since this install. Credit roll, color gradient and test pattern are not in media generators. It looks like a few missing transitions but nothing I use. Don’t see Sony Border in FX. Haven’t checked all of them.

I don’t know what else might be missing. I guess I’m going to have to uninstall and reinstall again? Should it be a clean install?

[Paul Doss]

Did another clean install. Now all of the FXs and Generated Media are back. I think I must have missed deleting an entry somewhere the first time. But unfortunately it still stops responding after a time.

I’m slowly going through the drivers but so far all of them have been up to date.