Problem starting ANY Mediastudio programs

[smusgrave]

Hello, and thankyou in advance for any help you may be able to offer.

I received my copy of Mediastudio Pro 7.0 yesterday and was really looking forward to jumping in and making something of my stack of raw footage DV tapes.

Alas, after installing, none of the programs will actually load. They all start a process that takes 99% of system resources (e.g. VCapture.exe), but nothing comes up, not even a splash screen. I thought maybe they will be taking a while to start for the first time so I left it for a while... still nothing.

I have updated my DirectX and my display drivers to the latest versions, I installed service pack 3 on the off chance that might help, I removed some programs that I thought could perhaps be causing a conflict, and still nothing.

I have a feeling I'm going to have to rebuild my PC and start from scratch on a nice clean system, which I planned to do in the near future anyway but I need to sort out my backups etc. first which is going to take a long time.

What I'm after is some general advice on the kind of things I should look at that might be causing the problem? I can't seem to find anything relevant to this problem anywhere else. Are there known issues with certain other application? I'm afraid I don't have much more info to offer at the moment but any help or advice would be very much appreciated.

(P.S. The program works fine on my laptop, so I know the discs are fine... my laptop however is pretty old and isn't suitable for the job )

Regards,

[Terry Stetler]

If C: has not enough free space or room for the swapfle to grow (necessary for swapping program modules in/out) or if some junkware has done something screwey it can do this. This is one major reason why it's a bad idea to install editing software on a "general use" computer.

The BEST way to handle this is to have a dualboot setup with one OS installation for daily use and a second one for editing software only. When the computer starts up you get a menu of which setup you want to use.

WinXP and Win2K will automatically set up a dualboot when you install the 2nd OS install to another partition...just watch the installer prompts.

The other method is to have a computer dedicated to editing, but most people won't want to do it this way for the cost alone.

Either method isolates your editing software to a very condensed OS installation, one you will hopefully not use for email or installing any games, junkware etc. that can easily mess up specialized software.

Using an isolated installation is something that only benefits Ulead products: it's something every reputable company that makes editing software recommends to let their products operate at highest efficiency. Adobe, AVID etc. etc.

One other thing to do is to use a program like GHOST to back up the editing OS and hardware driver installs BEFORE installing any editing software. That way if an errant Windows/program patch or whatever messes things up you can reinstall that OS in about 20 minutes vs. hours.

Also turn OFF automatic Windows updates and keep a record of what patches, drivers etc. do get installed for later reference in case there is a problem. Not all of Windows updates are good for an editing system