Have you tried narrowing down the problem? i.e. removing video and audios FX one by one, disabling resampling, etc...

My Vegas 3 and Vegas 4 has been running flawlessly ever since I got it. Might want to check into problems with your computer. Vegas is a very solid program.

i would do what philfort just said, sometimes the freeware plugins cause problem.
i never had problem since 3.0, it rocks solid.

I have had no problems with v4 at all love it. No crashes at all jsut finished upa hour video documentary with no problems.

I've actually had two crashes since upgrading to v4 - I don't think I ever had one with v3. So v4 does seem buggier to me too...

One was cutting (ctrl-c) text from the text media generator, and the other one was cutting keyframes from an event... unfortunately I haven't found a way to repro them.

And then there's the irritating bug where you have to click a keyframe marker twice before you can move it.

And I ran into another bug last night (not a crash)... when you loop playback on an audio clip that has been pitch shifted, the playback "advances" a little with each loop.

Yeah - that advancing... It's been happening to me in Acid. Even worse - Vegas4 has been "generating errors" and closing. That's not cool. I'm wondering if there is some sort of hardware conflict. I don't have any freeware plug ins. I rarely have to use any plug ins. All this stuff I'm doing lately is just rendering and rerendering trying to get it all right on DVD. What a mess. And V3 doesn't support the new plug-ins or AC3 encoding. Drag.

Studioman: what format are you rendering to when you freeze?

MPEG2 DVD Architech NTSC video stream. This I can accomplish in 3.0, but not 4.0. I wish 3.0 was forward compatible with all the stuff I can use in 4.0.

Studioman: Do you have and Athlon dual machine? running hot?

No - 1GHz PIII. But I'm wondering if it's not maybe the power supply. I've been listening to the PS fan slow down a bit whenever I'm number crunching. Does V4 crunch a bit harder than V3? I'll have to watch and see. Good guess, tho.

I have a P3-600, and I had a similar freeze occasionally (AVI as well as mpeg renders). I attribute it heat, since the box is in an enclosed cabinet (yes, I know it's a dinosaur) Now, I leave the front and rear cabinet doors wide open while rendering and have not had a problem (other than the loooooooong wait to render)

OK... you're going to think this is extreme. WARNING move all liquids out of range of keyboard before you read further to avoid spilling.

I once visited a web site for overheating solutions and one solution was (no laughing please) to take an old but still working refrigerator, cut a hole in the door, then mount the computer inside with only the front panel exposed to the outside world. Some nut... oops guy, apparently did this, had lots of pictures on how he did it. Never did mention how he cut the hole in the refigerator door (seems like the hard part) or if or not condensation was a problem. As you probably can tell, I'm not the handyman type.

I recently built up a new computer with a 400w power supply. While installing XP, the power supply failed. When I returned the case to the dealer he told me that many of the new power supplies use a peak power rating instead of continuous rating. These units are cheaply made and are marginal in performance. Many stability problems are due to flaky power supplies. The new one I used weighed about two to three times the amount of the original. The new one was rated at 285w continuous. The new setup has been completely stable. I'm using VV3 so no guarantees.

"why so buggy?"

Well there is an attention grabbing headline, but I wonder if you did the basic things that anybody doing video should do first before making it, like running the Prime95 torture test and the Dos booted Memtest.

I would think since nobody else has reported how "buggy" the program is that it just may be machine specific. The Prime 95 torture test will report computational errors that abound on PCs with tweaked memory or buss speeds that show their ugly heads only when rendering or encoding. Even though your machine might seem ok, I have literally seen a hundred cases of these type of problems with the intense stress caused by rendering in NLEs, Mpg Encoders like CCE, and audio encoders like Besweet.

Last week I saw two machines with bad memory that ONLY showed up when encoding. Anyway, I wish you would try those two things and let us know how they go.

PS, although all night is recommended, I think just running Prime 95 TT for a few hours would show any problems there. Likewise for Memtest. Links below.

ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v2212.zip
http://www.memtest86.com/#download0

Yeah - I guess it sounds a bit pretentious.

But - Those links sound like a winner. I'm all over it after I get a little sleep. Great to have other heads to bang around for ideas. Thanks.

"I'm all over it after I get a little sleep."

StudioMan3000, gee, I did not mean to run you off. I, and I am sure others, would like to know if you made any progress on finding what is/was causing you problems.