Large project in Premiere CS3 causes Windows XP64 to reboot

Question

Ok...I have a rather sizeable project going in Premiere CS3.  It contains a rather large number of animations created in Autodesk Maya (most between 10 seconds and 3 minutes long) and a large number of stills, as well as scrolling background (a .mov file I created using Photoshop and Premiere) and a soundtrack created by myself (in Cakewalk/Sonar).  The total project is about 18 1/2 minutes in length....around 8 video tracks and 3 audio tracks at the moment. The main problem is that when I start working on it...either importing files and especially moving files around in the project or even just hitting the playback button, the system just reboots.  I have seen the infamous Windows "blue screen of death" flash briefly once or twice, but it doesn't hang...just goes right to the system BIOS screen.  The ONLY thing that seems to help is basically saving the project like every 30 seconds.  Import a file, save, conform file to widescreen, save, bring file into project, save, move file around a bit, save, add crossfade, save....you get the idea.
Now before I go too much futher here, I suspect the problem isn't actually with Adobe/Premiere as I had this happen a few times while I was creating the sound track in Sonar 4 as well.  The sound track is basically a pseudo-orchastral piece and is equally around 18 1/2 minutes long....currently with around 42 tracks of audio and 5 midi tracks.  The audio has been sampled down to a standard stereo wav file for the import into Premiere. And yes, as the audio portion of this project got bigger and bigger, it caused a few reboots as well (not to mention drop-outs, studders and all the other fun stuff associated with audio production).  With that, I was able to "compact" the Sonar file (basically a Sonar project defrag) and the reboot problem seems to have went away on that end.
The system itself SHOULD be able to handle this project...not top of the line, but pretty beefy. 2nd generation Intel i5 quad core, 16 gigs of Kingston DR-1600 RAM, Tascam US-428 for the audio and a good 2+ terabytes across 5 harddrives (3 internal 3 gig-per-second SATA's, 2 USB).  Also has a 4 gig HIS vid card with ATI chipset (still can't afford a FirePro yet).  While Premiere is installed on the (comparatively dinky) 160 gig C drive, I'm using the 500 gig E drive internal and a 500 gig USB drive as my work drives.  Most of the Maya animations are on the internal E drive but the rest...the stills and Premiere files and such...are on the USB drive.  I.e., the system itself should have plenty of rendering power for this.  Also I have replaced the C drive with a nearly identical twin.  After a recent crash, I finally broke down and got a backup C drive...in other words, I'm sure the drive(s) are a-ok...even put a brand new 500 watt power supply in just in case.
I have already re-installed XP64...a couple of times in fact, as just before I started this project one of those god-foresaken MS "critical updates" crashed the crap out of my computer.  Then on the first reinstall, something hosed in .NET framework during the "night of a thousand updates" so I had to scrap it and start the reinstall all over again.  Likewise, I reinstalled Premiere CS3 (along with everything else including Maya) once I finally had the computer running again.
A quick note here: I did create my own custom 1080 Hi Def widescreen settings for Premiere since CS3 didn't appear to have any such thing.  For short projects they seem to work just fine...although admitedly, the render time is a serious b*tch.  Likewise, all the Maya animations have been rendered out at 1080 widescreen, production quality (yea...the render time there was a killer too).
Another quick note:  While I'm trying to use Premiere exclusively while I'm working, on occasion I have had to open either Photoshop or Maya to deal with a couple of stills...and when I open something else, I get a "windows virtual memory to low" (16 gigs of RAM and the virtual memory is too low??).  Otherwise, except for Avira (virus scanner) I don't really have anything else running in memory...no screen savers, no desktop pictures, no Instant Messanger crap, etc..  Never cared for bells and whistles and such, so the system is pretty clean in that regard (and I do keep up on my degrags as well).
Finally, while I -am- grateful for any helpful suggestions regarding this, please do NOT simply tell me to upgrade something (Premiere, Windows, etc) as point blank; it ain't gonna happen.  Aside from the fact that Adobe seems to have made Premiere CS4 and up much more difficult to use (I have -many- niggles about the newer interfaces there...using CS5.5 at the college and it's REALLY annoying) and aside from my wife being a MS programmer/developer and having to listen to her complain about Windows 7 and 8, we're in the process of buying a new house, so any and all "disposable income" is nill...and will be for quite some time.  No money...zero...nadda...i.e. no upgrades.  Further, while granted this is certainly the biggest project I've done to date, I've ran this setup/configuration for at least the past 3 years now without a hitch...this all seems to have started with that last MS critical update (at the risk of sounding paranoid, I'm really starting to think they slid a nasty in that last one to FORCE people to upgrade since they're discontinuing XP64 support soon). 
Alrighty...I know that's a lot but I wanted to provide as many details as I could here in hopes that someone can help me get a handle on this reboot issue.  Getting to be REALLY annoying having to save every 30 seconds or so.  I have searched the help files, but got tired of randomly sorting thru all the blather and not finding anything helpful.
I'm grateful for any help here...thanks!
Jim

Answer 1

Well, I'm about 98% sure it isn't a hardware problem.  I had already pulled the RAM and tried some backup RAM I have sitting in the box (8 gigs of Corsair), went thru the harddrives weeks ago with Chkdsk and everything was a-ok there (a couple of bad clusters on the old C drive, but that has since been replaced and is on the shelf as a backup), motherboard seems to be fine, re-seated all cards and cables, etc..  Again I even slapped a new 500 watt PS in just in case (the old one was a 400 watt and with all the crap I have on this system, thought it might have been a voltage drop off issue...nadda).   I did have a bit of a heat problem a while back...one of the case cooling fans was going bad and the CPU was getting just hot enough to trip the system (about 5 degrees over).  That said, that also shows up in the BIOS monitor as well and was easy enough to track down.  Either way, the bad cooling fan has been replaced and I even added a "squirrel cage" style fan as well...system is running nice and cool now.
BTW...I used to be A+ certified on both PC's and Macs when I was a hardware tech (not to mention HP, IBM and Lexmark certified, Cat 5 installer, etc), so I like to think I know my hardware fairly well.  Not just a weekend warrior on that front...used to do it for a living.
I had also already tried manually resizing the paging file as well...tried different sizes, tried spreading it out across the drives, etc..  Didn't really make a difference either way and again the only time the virtual memory low comes up is if I try to open Photoshop or Maya while this big project is open in Premiere.  That said, Photoshop and Maya both tend to be pigs when it comes to memory/RAM (Photoshop especially).  Doesn't seem to happen with Illustrator or any other program....just PS and Maya if this project is open in Premiere.  
One other oddity I have noticed recently is actually with Maya.  Before all of this started...in other words, before that last MS critical update and 3 days of reinstalling software...I used to be able to do a background render with Maya and still be able to keep working on stuff.  I'd fire off batch render and then I could move on to other things...editing images in Photoshop (CS 5 there if it matters), surfing the web and even doing some light stuff in Premiere.  Since this problem has been occuring however, I have noticed that the Maya batch renders are REALLY slowing down the system big time.  Difficult to even check my email while a batch is running.  Likewise, I have noticed that since I upgraded the Maya from 2011 to 2013, Maya has a nasty tendency to freeze during a batch render.  If I have a long batch render, I'll set it up to run over night...when I get up the next moring, the render itself will still be running (you can see Mayabatch.exe still going in processes under Task Manager) but Maya is totally frozen up.  Now I did that update at the same time as the rest of this mess happened so I don't know if these problems are due to the Maya upgrade or the (apparent) Windows problem...I'm inclined to believe the latter.
BTW...after having a project file get corrupted yesterday during one of these shut downs, I've been double saving the files (so as to have a backup) and that too seems to have made things a bit better.  Hasn't actually shut down on me when I've been doing this.  That said, it's also a serious pain in the butt having to save that way too.
With that, looking thru the rest of Hunt's article there, I did kill indexing services...at least on the work drives.  it's about the only thing there that I haven't tried, so we'll see what happens this afternoon.  I seriously doubt that would be the problem though as usually that would give an error or a lockup and not an instant shut down, but we'll see.