Premiere Elements 8 under Windows 7: HOW TO DO?

Question

My system is a MICROSTAR (MEDION) Quadcore 6600(think it's made by MSI) with 4GB memory, 2 x 1TB HD Wetern Digital GREEN (replacing the very poor quality Seagates 2 x 500Gig originaly installed) and running Windows 7 64 and 32 Ultimate. The 32 version was installed especially for PE8
Why I didn't stay with PE7?
Strange enough, PE7 worked perfectly under Windows 7 64bit RC and RTM, but with the Official release of Windows 7 32 or 64 Ultimate, it was finished with the Happy Hour, Crash, crash, crash all the time!
So I downloaded from Adobe a official PE8 and started very happily with it.
But it was CRASH & GO all the way !!!
I have send a few messages to Adobe Contact, which deviated me to this forum so I could spit my poison far from their "Ivory Tower" No answers or help from them. PE8 is paid, so go to ...
I found out immediately that I was one of the many people to regret this "Buy of the Year", but since PE7 didn't work and Windows 7 is so good that I don't want to go back to XP or Vista, I had to find a way to make this SH.. work. Luckily the Forum proposed me a few solutions for which I am very grateful.
After a few editing's with DV (about 3hours long), I am having a little bit more experience with this PE8-pre-beta-thing.
First of all I disabled the GPU-thing in the preferences, then I disabled the "Background rendering".
The  Medion computer has a "diet" Nvidia Geforce 8600 so there are no 3D drivers to disable, neither has Windows 7 this Windows Defender, so that could also not be the problem.
Anyhow, these few minor changes seem to have solved a lot of crash problems.
Also, NEVER open a PE7 project in PE8 !!!!! It's really not 100% compatible: no way to render previews and crashes guarantied!
Be very careful in applying transitions and video effects, especially if you start cumulating them. Maybe they will work in preview, but you never know if you will be able to render a film or DVD from it.
For example "camera view" + "Soft edge" ( since I have a Dutch version, I don't know if these are the right names) to make a kind of 3D frame around your image. No problem in PE7, but PE8 doesn't digest it! The only way to render this to a film is to import the project in to PrProCS4 and change the other transitions which are not supported by PrPro with similar ones. Or going from New York to Chicago over Mexico City!!
If you take care of these precautions you can work very satisfactory with PE8, without crashing more then was the case with PE7 (low memory problems)
This PE8 should have been written for 64 bit, so it would have suffered much less memory problems, then now.
Some things I like better with PE8, like the ClipArt's, the Menu's and the new Smartmovie themes, which I create and then edit manually.
Automatic backup creates now 5 instead of one file.
What I don't like:
If you capture in scenes, it's still scene 11 coming after scene 109 etc, instead of counting from 001.
With PE7, you could see in which map the project you wanted to open was situated, here not.
Place of the Project changed, without reason, change for the fun of change?
Making "markers" has become more complicated, without improving. Also changed just for the fun of it?
Can still not capture HDV by scenes, for that I have to use Sony Vegas.
Until now I didn't try to edit HDV in PE8, because I don't trust PE8.
What we really need is for Adobe to bring a major update to fix al these annoying misfits and to make a customer's dialog instead of a one way street policy.
If I find new ways to make work easier and without crashing I will not hesitate to let you know.
Until then, hope this can help you a little bit!
Roald

Answer 1

NO, YOU CANNOT !!!!
If your project was started in PE7  and you import that project to PE8, you cannot, I REPEAT, you CANNOT render this files to a preview.
You wil get the render window, but no counter or anything else will move or happen.
Nothing, rien , nada, niets, nichts!!!!!!
At least not here on neither of the 3 installations which I did under 3 different Windows 7 !!!!