hey hey guys! i am happy to report, I FIXED MY VEGAS!
first and foremost, i was mistaken… it wasn’t isntantbird and lanmessenger, it was instabird and stickypassword, and for SOME inexplicable reason, vegas 10 HATES stickypassword. i tested it by not loading stickypassword at all, and then by just exiting it… and i just have to turn it off before i run vegas.
ALSO
i found some great help on yootoob. tips about changing the preview-threading in the options, to lower the memory/threads to ZERO while rendering. (not while previewing though). that gives the renderer more hardware to work with.
i also used the CFF explorer suite to set vegas 10 to use more than 2gig of memory, and that smoothed it out a lot.
thank goodness! 🙂