Premiere Pro CC 2014 freezes frequently and crashes

Question

Since upgrading from Premiere Pro CC to Premiere Pro CC 2014 my projects crash in regular intervals, which didn't happen before.
All my settings and presets have been pulled across fine, but suddenly relatively slim projects get stuck during editing, rendering or exporting. The progress bar stops, the preview screen freezes and that's it. I can only radically crash the sucker. I did delete all preview files and it improved marginally... only that the time until it froze took a few minutes longer.
I'm on 64bit high-end Windows 7 machine and have never had this problem with previous versions of Premiere Pro.
Very frustrated.

Answer 1

@bendubb37: I'm not the least bit defensive about complaints regarding the stability and general quality of the program. As a quality engineer on the Premiere Pro development team (not a member of the technical support team), I'm quite familiar with many if not most of the problems--both those that are legitimate bugs in our code and those that result from conflicts with OSes, hardware, codecs, other programs, etc. I genuinely appreciate having customers come to this forum to report issues they're having. Such reports sometimes help us identify bugs that we weren't aware of, and they always help us to prioritize bugs to fix based on which issues are biting the most customers and having the greatest impact on their productivity and satisfaction. And naturally I understand the frustration and anger of customers who are wrestling with one problem or another in the program.
What I took issue with was cutco's derision of a perfectly valid troubleshooting step recommended by a technical support agent and his assertions that a) "This community is kind of useless" and b) "Adobe is absent." Cutco graciously acknowledged that he had let his frustration get the best of him.
As to the oft-repeated claim that CC2014 is buggier and less stable than prior versions, I submit that it's a problematic claim to substantiate, at least based on anecdotal personal experience or taking the pulse of this forum & others. There's no question that some customers who enjoyed smooth sailing with an earlier version are experiencing problems with CC2014. But I know for a fact that this release included fixes for a significant number of bugs, including crashers, so many other customers who were having problems with earlier versions are now cruising along without a hitch (or at least without those old, fixed hitches). Alas, those people are not frequenting the forum to sing the praises of CC2014.
My point here is simply that claims about the relative quality of one release versus others can be a distraction from the more important--and much more concrete--fact: a certain number of customers using CC2014 are having Problem X, which didn't happen in CC7.x. The more we can learn about Problem X--and the more clearly we can differentiate X from Y and Z, which may manifest similarly--the sooner we can nail down the cause.
Don't get me wrong: there is an objective trajectory of a product's quality. Unfortunately, even when you have a large pool of data in front of you, the trajectory doesn't lend itself to quantification. You can't simply count the number of deferred bugs, for instance, because not all bugs are equal. You can't even go by the number of known crashers because some are extreme edge cases while others lurk in the path of mainstream workflows. That said, for people like me who spend our working lives trying to deliver the highest quality possible, the trajectory our program's quality is a common topic of discussion.