Render Freeze/Crash at the end - program not responding

Question

Hi guys
Im at my end with this problem and would appreciate a solution or explination to the problem im having.
when i render my project for final output it renders all frames and gets to the end on the progress bar but as soon as it seems to finish it freezes. So it does not seem to finalize. (program goes into "not responding") i have left it for up to 4 hours and still it simply hangs. this is happening with all projects and scenes regardless of the resolution or memory allocation.
im running CS4 with windows 7 and have version 9.0.3 of After Effects. im also using the latest optical flares plugin with all updates. my hardware is Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU [email protected]   2.66GHz
insalled RAM is 4GB with 3.24GB usable
32 bit operating system
Graphics card is NVIDIA Ge-Force GTX285 with 2GB of independant memory
Please help me find some path to solve this problem
thank you

Answer 1

With only 4 GB RAM, you shouldn't be using multiprocessing.  If it's on, turn it off.  If you're using Open GL to accelerate rendering, turn that off too:  it rarely helps, and often hurts.  Your problem might be solved that easily.
But since you're on AE 9, it the footage you use could also be the problem.  Most commonly it would be footage from XDCams, HDV cameras and DSLRs.  AE 10 solved the problem, but that won't help you right now.  However, a reply I used to give all the time on the Creative COW may still still apply:
Dave's Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following -- footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVCHD, mp4, mts, m2t, H.261 or H.264 -- you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information.  However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information.  Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
I'm a Mac guy, so I like to convert to Quicktime movies in the Animation or PNG codecs; both are lossless.  I'll use Apple's Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder or Quicktime Pro to do it.