Crashing and slow performance in Elements 8.0

Question

Been using Adobe products for years and I feel lucky that everything up until this point has been relatively bug-free and flawless (for me anyway).  I feel like the main problem is in Windows Vista/7 because I never had issues in XP.  Regardless, here is my setup and predicament:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64
EVGA X58 Classified motherboard
Intel i7 930 Quad core processor
12 gigs of 1600mhz RAM
Dual NVIDIA GTX 470s (1280mb GDDR5) in SLI
and a couple terabytes of space on some Western Digital Black HDs
Needless to say, this machine screams and should be able to launch a satellite into space without even a pico-second's-worth of a hiccup, yet simple functions in Adobe programs cause constant program AND full system crashes.  I've made sure all updates are applied and latest drivers are installed.  I actually rolled back the GTX 470 drivers because I was getting a driver error in Elements with the newest ones.  Since the roll-back, I haven't had that error anymore.
I capture all footage through firewire from a Sony DSR-25 DV Deck, and the first problem occurs when simply bringing up the capture window (F5).  The first thing that happens EVERY time is that it is slow to load, loading sections of the window at a time (outer window frame first, then the preview screen, then individual sections around it), I'd say 3-4 seconds total wait time on that.  The other issue is that, the window comes up but doesn't load (just shows the capture window frame, filled with a blank white).  This is actually where the machine requires a full system restart.  It is totally locked up at this point.
For comparison, in Premiere Pro CS5, I do not have this problem with the capture window (though it has its' own issues).  I hit F5 and the window immediatly pops up fully loaded.
For another comparison, I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop (5+ years old) running Windows XP Pro and Elements seems pretty flawless there, as well as Premiere Pro CS3.
While individual drivers might be the issue, I really think the operating system itself is the bigger issue, though I haven't tested this.  Is Elements 8 optimized for 32 bit OS rather than Windows 7 64 I run now?  What about CS5?  Does anybody run CS5 on Windows XP 64?
Thanks for any help with this!

Answer 1

What you are describing is pretty much what I was dealing with for some time while using PE 8 on my Win 7 x64 Ultimate machine (HP Pavilion Elite HPE 180t with Intel x58 chip set and Intel quad-core i7 930 running at 2.8 GHrz, single NVIDIA GeForce GTX260 graphics card with 1.8 GB memory, 12 GB RAM, two internal 1 TB WD 7200rpm Caviar Black HDDs, BD ROM and BD burner optical drives, and PSU upgraded to TX650W Corsair).  To resolve very slow rendering of HD video files with many hangups and crashes I first upgraded to latest NVIDIA graphics drivers and to the latest software update for my Apple QuickTime Pro; but even with the new higher-end PC above and the software updates noted, I still had to resort to things such as the following to be able to do HD rendering and burning without hangups and crashes: turning off 3-D capabilities in my NVIDIA GTX260 card, turning off GPU in PE, turning off AutoAnalysis in PE, disabling all the stuff in my Norton Internet Security software suite while using PE (I found today that a couple Norton services reload themselves if I stop them while running PE 8), disabling my screen saver, disconnecting the computer from my LAN, and disabling a number of Services and applications that loaded at startup and ran in the background.  I can now run PE 8 with significantly more speed and stability.  Because I was able to largely get PE 8 to run with pretty good stability on my system outlined above I doubt if the PE 8 and 9 issues reported in this forum have all that much to do with the Win 7 x64 OS.
And here is another issue I encountered with Win 7 x64 Ultimate while installing or running a few apps, but was able to find a fix for it ( http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7repair/thread/ab0126ac-7df0-4f6a-9653-7 5d6f2ddca93 ).  However, this issue usually pops up a a very specific error message as noted in the thread above so I really do not know if that is applicable to the PE 8 issues (but then it would probably not be a bad idea to look into this and maybe apply the fix noted in the thread since it clearly benefits other apps and could potentially help PE 8).  On my computer I found that PE 8 appeared to be sensitive to some other apps and Services running in the background, and especially Norton Internet Security stuff which can be a real problem to temporarily turn off completely to avoid conflicts.  At any rate, because I made all the changes above in one long fit of PE frustration last week, I do not actually know which of the changes are really the important ones in terms of speed and stability in PE 8 (it's certainly possible most or all contributed incrementally to resolving my PE 8 challenges), but the cumulative effect of the changes is that PE 8 on my Win 7 x64 Ultimate OS managed computer is now a fully functional software app.  And since I purchased the PE 9 upgrade from Adobe today, I am hoping these changes will also apply to PE 9 and that new version will be even more stable on my computer -- I shall see about that over the next week as I get into editing, rendering, and burning a number of 3- 5 GB full-HD video files from this past weekend using my new PE 9.