Photoshop CS4 - odd behavior in titling

All,
I edit video almost every night and every weekend and have been doing this for several years now.  Suddenly, I'm seeing an odd behavior now that I've never seen before. 
I created a title that consists only of a red circle and have it as one of my title templates.  I've used the red circle template across many projects without problems  I use it to highlight an athlete in the video.  I use keying so that the circle stays around the athlete for the entire clip so that a coach can focus on the specific athlete during the action.  My videos are used by college coaches for recruiting high school athletes.
In the last few days, when I select the red circle title and the Motion bar under Video Effects under Effects Control so I can perform the keying, the video will flip to black so that all I see is the red circle on a black background.  If I drag the scrubber a little, the video reappears with the red circle overlayed, but as soon as I release the scrubber, the video goes black again. This makes it impossible to change the key values for the title since I can't see the video.
For trouble-shooting, I created a new red circle title from scratch but it behaves the same.  I tried using a completely different title but it behaves the same.
I assume I inadvertantly hit a switch somewhere that has changed the behavior, but I can't figure this out.  If someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong, I would greatly appreciate your help.
Thanks,
Dan
Windows 7 64-bit
Adobe Production Premium CS4
Adobe PPro CS4 4.2.1
Canon AVCHD video with output typically to H.264
Asus Laptop G74Sx with 8g RAM and Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU @2GHz

What exaxctly are you talking about? Using the graphic in Premiere? If so, this is probably a more appropriate question for the PPro forum. That aside, why even bother? Premiere's title tool can do circles with transparency no problem and then After Effects has this neat parametric Circle effect and a motio0n tracker, too. Sounds like you love doing things the hard way....
Mylenium

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    - Is there a way to get window behavior back the way it was in CS3? The new way of handling windows is ok, but i liked the old one better. If i disable "floating windows docking" there's no way to maximize a window INSIDE the photoshop workspace. The maximize button on top of every window is right now completely useless because it maximizes the window AND gets rid of all the menus and palettes. I don't see why i want to do that.
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    All the best,
    Pickman

    Photoshop CS4 does cause crashes. I can vouch for that too. When it happens, the first instinct is almost always to assume that something is wrong with the computer and start from there. Comments to this effect are prominent in many threads. It is also Adobe's prevalent approach. So people experiencing these problems will tend not to post on these forums. Statements like 'because there are only a few posts, a significant number of people are not experiencing [these] problems' are therefore unfounded. There simply has not been time yet for people to resolve potential hardware/system problems.
    In my case, I started experiencing unexplained crashed with CS3 in July (see below) but it was only when Adobe admitted that they could be partly to blame that I posted my experiences (elsewhere) on this forum.
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    I am coming to the conclusion that there must be something intrinsically wrong with PS/CS4 that makes it incompatible with some systems and software installations, but not necessarily because of any fault with the latter. I have to say that, after initially trying to push me away, Adobe are being very helpful and clearly want (need?) to get to the bottom of this. The trouble is that when the system locks up, it is completely and utterly paralysed, so any diagnostic and error reporting systems are inoperative. This suggests something beneath or beyond Windows, and, if it is not hardware, this points the finger of blame squarely at the activation software, which uses rootkit technology. (Would this be the same on a Mac, I wonder?)
    For the record, my system is a Dell Precision 370 desktop with Dell/Phoenix BIOS A08, 3.2GHz Pentium 4 CPU, Intel 925X chipset, 2MB ECC SDRAM, Nvidia Quadro FX3450 graphics, 2x Seagate 146MB Cheetah 5.5k disks (SCSI) in non-RAID configuration. From the limited experience I have had, it seems perfectly capable of running the software (apart from when it crashes, of course.)

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