CS5 locks my PC constantly

Question

I cannot even use the mouse or keyboard to shutdown when this happens.  I have to power down in order to reboot.  I can work for hours in Lightroom and Photoshop, but Pro will lock up the system in minutes or seconds.  This has happened on multiple projects, on both DV & DSLR and even just leaving the open new project dialog box open to go to the bathroom.  I'd think that it was my sytem that is unstable but there are no unexplained event log errors and so far no other programs are behaving this way.
A task as simple of playing back a single clip with no effects causes this issue if I play enough clips.
Since PPro has always been my bigest headache for stability, I built this new machine so that PPro CS5 would work.  It is a win7x64, 12gb, gtx-285, 980x cpu with standard bios setting, no overclocking.
If anyone has any constructive ideas, please post them.  Right now, I am very discouraged.
One interesting tidbit that I have found is that every time I open an existing project, it reconforms all of my footage's audio files, even after finishing, saving the project, and exiting cleanly.  Is this normal for CS5?

Answer 1

Again, why does CS5 conform all audio clips EVERY time the project is opened?  It even does this inside of media encoder when you select a PPRO sequence.  Couldn't this be a clue?
This should not be happening, but several users with CS4 experienced the same. In some cases, the Scratch Disks were on externals, usually USB, for some, they (or the Assets) were on networked drives. Some had moved the Assets around, or the Scratch Disk around. Still, for too many, there was never a reason found. May have been a few more causes, that I am just forgetting now.
Again, it should NOT be happening, and it would be good to find out why, as it might also help some of those CS4 users.
Though you probably have not used CS5 all that much, especially with the lock-ups, have you encountered any Project file corruption? Have you encountered any corrupted Assets, either inside of PrPro, or in other programs?
As the PRPROJ files are basically XML databases with links to the various Assets, and sets of instructions as to what the program will do with them, upon Export, it would seem that either the links to the CFA & PEK files is being lost for some reason. As mentioned above, this can happen when those files are locked (like with Windows Indexing), moved, renamed, or otherwise unavailable. PrPro will regenerate those files, if it cannot access the first ones - regardless of why it cannot access them, or locate them. This is what you are seeing, but the WHY is a mystery, at least at this point.
Unfortunately, other than mentioning some of the causes, plus the "unknown," I do not have anything useful. Since we are currently blessed with some Adobe presence here, maybe one of the folk, with inside knowledge, can comment. There might well be more Bug reports, than we saw here. Maybe Adobe knows of a potential cause, and can shed light on that - if so, I'll be glad to try and link some of those old threads to the answer.
Good luck,
Hunt
PS - similar has happened to some users of PrElements. Do not recall if those were version specific, but would assume that they happened with PrE 7, or PrE 8, as I do not recall hearing of the issue in earlier version. PrPro is not alone in this behavior, though the causes might well be different.