New install help. Please and thanks!

Question

I'm hoping somebody can tell me what's going wrong with my new install.  Here are the details:
Win7 pro
i7 950
Quadro 4000 (with massive cooling blowing on the thing)
mxo2 mini max (because I'm slightly cheap, and yes, I feel a little like a hack plugging RCA cables rather than XLR for audio)
24g ram
Gtech 4tb graid
2 internal SATA drives (one boot, the other for utilities like tone, graphics I use often, etc.)
Software:
PremPro (AE, AME, etc) 5.51 (haven't updated to 5.52 - problem here?)
Squeeze 7
Trapcode plugins
Drivers:
NVidia: 276.14 (this is the Adobe approved one, at least so the download site said)
Matrox: mtxutils_551
So here are the issues:
-->  Code 7 errors while editing a long program ("Open GL does not meet min specs for application").  Before this happens, generally premiere will become unresponsive, program screens will go black and then boom.  On this program, I can get about 6 edits in before it blows.
-->  Cannot export long program (2+ hours).  (Matrox 1080i sequence - footage all P2 DVCPRO HD) Crashes after transcoding approximately 15-20 minutes of program.  Exporting to Graid where project and footage is stored (is this an issue?) Premiere crashes and computer restarts. Tried many different export settings, from "match sequence settings" to Premiere's mpeg2 setting, to the Sorrensen and the Matrox ones.
(Adobe Tech support and a very nice guy named Vinay helped me with a small workaround which involved opening up a hidden admin login, and disabling some Microsoft services and exporting to my spare internal drive)
-->  Also tried importing sequence directly into Encore and AME then transcoding through those.  No luck there.
-->  Premiere Pro on closing gives error message "Premiere Pro has stopped working;  appcrash exception code 00005.  Also, this is occasionally followed by a Visual C++ runtime error
-->  Capture plugins from Matrox are unavailable.  No Matrox capture settings are available.
-->  No WYSUWYG control panel for MX02 (I know this is an Adobe site, but figured someone might have some insight maybe)
So there's the beginning.  There are more, but these are the biggies at this point.
Thanks a million.  I'm a very busy one man shop and sincerely appreciate any other busy people taking the time to give me some input on this.
Shaunn

Answer 1

Thanks Jim.  Yeah, that was my suspicion as well. Right out of the box their damm plug-ins didn't install correctly, and it takes roughly a week to get familiar with all the "known issues" - a phrase that irritates me to no end - (if there are known issues - FIX EM before you sell me your s*%t!  Can you imagine delivering a project to a client with a 14 page list of "known issues"?!?!?  Seriously!)
There was a point where I really loved my Matrox products back in the old Digisuite days.  But there was this point where their world class tech support policies changed, and frankly it seems that was the point where the whole company became hack.  I was pretty skeptical about buying the mxo2 in the first place because of this, allowed myself to be "sold" because I needed to get back to work quickly, put the problem out of my mind and get back to work...and now I'm dealing with this.
Thanks for the link.  I think you're right, it would be nice if Adobe would address monitoring through a gpu.  But I'm guessing that won't be until CS6.5, by which point we'll all have to paying Adobe a monthly subscription vig to use their products.  This crap irritates me to no end.  I would love to see a reasonably priced and robust editing system that works like a hammer.  I'm a busy 2 man shop - I gotta pound my video nails quickly and get on to the next house.
Assuming I get rid of matrox...what's the best current solution for monitoring?  Doesn't sound like Aja or Blackmagic have any better solutions.
Shaunn