Mercury playback engine makes Premiere crash after cs6 update

Question

Hi there everyone,
I have been working with Premiere cs5 for over a year without any serious errors. Since I upgraded the entire Creative Suite to cs6 however, I am forced to use the software playback method instead of the GPU accelerated one. Using the last mentioned causes Premiere to crash immediately when trying to drag any sort of video on the timeline. This happens in new projects as well as in cs5 ones; and all of the footage involved in both cases was ingested in the wellknown Matrox i-frame codec that always worked fine before. Specs:
Windows 7, 24 gB RAM (not sure whether DDR3 or 5), NVidia Quadro 4000, dual six-core CPU, several terras of HD @ 7200 rpm, Matrox MX02 LE, CS6.
I tried every possible combination and order of uninstalling an reinstalling Premiere, the Matrox drivers and the nVidia drivers, including older versions of the last two mentioned, but to no avail. Though it looks like an NVidia issue (I read somewhere about CS5 and 5.5 certified NVidia drivers but not CS6 yet) this problem manifested right after the upgrade to CS6.
The error reported is about the graphics card being reset, it stops and then recovers, leaving Premiere to hang. The card's hardware reacts with a noisy cooling fan acceleration sound that slowly falls back to its normal rpm.
-Sigh- I am sorry to bother you with this, but does anyone have any idea or experienced something similar? Does the combination of the mentioned elements ring a bell...?
Any help is utterly appreciated !

Answer 1

Hi Harm,
I couldn't find anything in the logs about temperature, but I did find some other logs. However: when I re-install a newer NVidia driver version, the PC will not crash, only Premiere crashes in that case, which lets me believe this is not just a hardware defect. The hardware however does play a role.
What I found in the event viewer are messages like:
A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (4)
The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application
Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: LiveKernelEvent
Response: Not available  ETC ETC.
Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: AppHangB1
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0 Problem signature:
P1: Adobe Premiere Pro.exe
P2: 6.0.1.0
P3: 4fac933f
P4: e05a
P5: 1 ETC ETC
The program Adobe Premiere Pro.exe version 6.0.1.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed.
The NVIDIA OpenGL driver lost connection with the display
driver due to exceeding the Windows Time-Out limit and is unable to continue.
The application must close. Error code: 7
Visit http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3007 for more information.
Most of all I saw this:
Activation context generation failed for "C:\Windows\system32\vsnpstd3.dll".Error in manifest or policy file "C:\Windows\system32\vsnpstd3.dll" on line 2. The value "X64" of attribute "processorArchitecture" in element "assemblyIdentity" is invalid.
This report pops up hundreds of times... but I don't think the vsnpstd3.dll file, dating back to 2009, could be a problem all of a sudden.
It looks more like a Windows Time-out thing causing to reset the graphics card because the load of graphic data is too big to handle. The only strange thing is that the time-out action is taken by Windows before the usual two seconds have passed, it takes just a fraction of second. This leads me to believe that, during the demand from the Mercury Playback Engine to the NVidia card, "false information" is passed to Windows... i.e. a software problem.
I am thinking about rolling back to Premiere CS5 to see what happens... if this version would be working flawless again, that would be pretty steady proof for doubting the MPE of CS6.
To be continued...