After Effects CS6 locks up on render

Question

This started out with my installing an old sound card (Creative Labs Audigy LS) which was made for XP. I installed the hardware, found some third party drivers for Vista 64, and my problems began. While working on a project in AE CS6, I discovered that my queued renders would crash after the first one, sometimes with a "Dynamiclinkmediaserver.exe has stopped working" error. I've also noticed in the Task Manager that Quicktime doesn't always seem to be running - if I start up Adobe Media Encoder, it's there, so I'm thinking that maybe something got stepped on. If I run Adobe Media Encoder, the Quicktime module shows up, and I might be able to render off one file from AE, but then it will crash - crash isn't the right word - the screen goes black, and the fans on my machine start running really hard. I have to do a hard reboot, and then I'm back to square one. Is there a way to fix the software without a total reinstall - I've got a lot of plugins, and it would be a real pain to reinstall all of them - is there maybe a "repair" feature on the CS6 discs that I can use? Thanks.

Answer 1

Somewhat sparse and vague is an understatement - it was late last night when I posted, and I was a bit fried, trying to output a project with 13 versions, and AE crashing (well not exactly crashing - I'll explain later) after every output.   First off, my system specs - dual-quad Intel machine with Vista Business SP2 64-bit (all of the Adobe apps have been running seamlessly on it until this problem - no doubt self caused).   I'm running the CS6 Master Collection, and everything is on the latest rev, AE included. I have a number of plugins from Red Giant on the system, although none of these were in use in the project. The only plugin in use was Video Copilot Optical Flares, and that's never given me a problem. I have the AE cache set to the Apps drive (oh yes - 500GB OS drive, 500GB Apps drive, and two 750GB Media Drives, plus an 8TB Drobo for backup). As I say, everything has been running just fine for a couple of years. The sound card I talk about below had already been disabled in the Device settings in Control Panel, and I had deleted the suspected drivers, and also disable one which hadn't gone away with the uninstall of the Creative Labs apps. I had set the system back to the on-board sound card (ATI), and I was getting audio fine with both RAM previews as well as renders. The problem was, almost every time I would do a render, using the Render Queue, the fan on my Nvidia GeForce GTX-260 (latest driverss - text file in AE hacked to show it) would ramp up, as it often does on renders, and then the comp would sometimes render, and sometimes the screen would just go black - no crash - system seemed to still be running, but with the fans maxed, and I would have to do a hard boot with the on-off button on the machine. When it came back, sometimes the QT would have rendered, sometimes not.
I was outputting a short station ID to Quicktime, Mjpg-A, at 100 percent quality, audio at 48Khz - nothing custom about it.
I had installed an old (2007, maybe?) Creative Labs SB Audigy LS in an open PCI slot - found some drivers which Creative Labs acknowledged as ok, but were third party. With some changes in Windows, audio was working in AE and everywhere else.  Since the problem, I have done a registry restore - I always back up the registry when I add new software or hardware, and I am just about to fire up the machine and try again with the sound card hardware removed, and the registry reset.