FYI: Premiere 7 repeatable crash solved - nVidia issue

Question

Here is my story of hair pulling / frustration today.
Symptoms:
Windows 7 x64 / 12 GB RAM / RAID-0 / Flash drive / blah blah blah, my system hardware and OS are solid
Premiere 7 worked fine yesterday
Today Premiere 7 will crash anytime the Edit >> Effects tab or Edit >> Titles tab is selected
Tried all the recommended vodoo in the articles, and nothing worked.
Uninstall / re-install did not work
Debugging error with Visual Studio shows a stack overflow error
Folder  Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Premiere Elements creates a mysterious new folder "G167 - 9-16-2008" everytime it crashes.
In this folder is a file called "Trace Database.txt" which has the following text:
ASL.MessagingService    1    5
Master    1    10
Most event viewer crash report entries show the following, no help:
However on a second look, this entry was found in the sea of crash reports:
Resolution:
nvSCPAPI.dll is a 3D glasses driver / application nVidia installs by default with their driver.
Yesterday I disabled it using an nVidia start menu application because I have no use for it
Disabling this feature caused the Premiere crashes (of course it did, woudln't that be obvious to anyone?)
Uninstalling the nVidia 3D vision application resolved the problem.

Answer 1

Wish PE7 had an x64 version of the software, I have got memory low warnings several times now when it bumped up against 2 GB of used memory.
I'm guessing that PrPro CS5 will be 64-bit, but some of that might be predicated on the actual release of Win7, and how well MS has done their SDK kit. If that happens (could also be CS5.5, or similar), I cannot imagine that PrE will be far behind.
Adobe has been doing surveys of PrPro users and several of the questions in each have been around "would you accept a 64-bit ONLY program?" Obviously, that would shut the upgrade door on many, until they migrated to a 64-bit OS. That might be more of an issue with the population of PrE users, as they would be less likely to run out and buy a new workstation for this program. Still, many folk, who are new to NLE's, are springing for some flavor of 64-bit for other reasons. Only Adobe's surveys and some good guesses by marketing, can determine their path.
Now, let's talk about your resources. I have 4GB on both machines (one with the 3GB switch, and one without). Still, we're not talking that much more RAM than you have.
I have a plan, that I implement on all machines, and then employ when I am doing editing:
The first thing that I do, before I do any editing, is clean out my system, using MSCONFIG to eliminate all unnecessary programs and Processes at boot. These are things like MS Messenger, iTunes Helper, Bonjour Services (I do need this for one progarm on my laptop, so I keep it there), and the like. These are little things that are usually installed by the OS, other programs, or the folk, who build the machine. Unless subsequent installs add this sort of stuff back, this is a one-shot deal.
Next, I manually Exit from my AV, spyware sweepers and pop-up blockers.
Last, I run a little utility, called EndItAll2, to then shut down all unnecessary programs and Processes (on a session basis, and not permanently, like MSCONFIG), prior to editing.
This gets my machine in as lean, clean and mean a status, as I can. Then, I edit.
I routinely work on some monster Projects with up to 8+ hours of material on the Timelines and 1000's of Assets. To date, I have never had one "out of resources" error. I am, however, doing SD Projects only - no HD yet.
Don't know what programs/Processes you might have loaded, but that would be one of the first places that I'd look - if you have not done so already.
Good luck,
Hunt