All the media for the project (95% of which is photoshops and QT movies) is stored on an 1.3 TB XRaid. And that’s my scratch disc for renders. The weird thing is that a different edit suite, using a 500 gig firewire drive for storage, is having the exact problem. As a test, I changed the scratch disc. Same result.
My latest thought: maybe it’s because I’m working on a Power PC, not an INTEL mac. I’m gonna do a test on an INTEL laptop later today.