Premiere Elements 9 crashes when I click new project

[brenda]

I bought PE9 and Steve's wonderful manual for it in December. I've had an intermittent problem of it crashing right after installation of the splash screen, when I would click on "New Project" or "Open Project". In January I reinstalled it and got it to work for a while, and successfully created a new project and exported it. And then a few weeks later when I went to use it, it crashed again when I clicked on "Open Project" or "New Project." I reinstalled and it worked for a while then started doing this again.

I had something similar happen a few times with PE4, but used it for several years with it only happening on rare occasions. I never figured out what the problem was with PE4.

I'm running Windows Vista with Norton Security Suite. I used Advanced System Care to scan and remove registry problems and then shut down ASC and any other programs running in the background, including Windows Media Center and Adobe Acrobat tray, before trying to load PE9. I don't know if it has anything to do with it or not, but in January I installed my New Blue effects (which I had successfully used with PE4). I see from other topics that some other PE9 user had to get new New Blue presets made specifically for PE9. But PE9 worked for a while after loading New Blue, so I don't know if that's the problem. One thing I noticed which is similar to the problem with PE4 is that the file shown loading which it normally hangs up on is smear.prm. That might be a New Blue effect - I'm not sure.

Any suggestions?

Brenda

[brenda]

UPDATE:

After posting the above question in the forum, I downloaded an Adobe patch 9.01 and installed it then rebooted. Now PrE 9 is working. (I'm writing from my other computer because I don't want to jinx it.)

Since this has happened so many times, I don't believe the problem is cured.

I'm wondering if the problem is that PrE 9 has to load from a completely fresh reboot. Maybe using my web browser first is keeping PrE 9 from installing correctly?

Brenda

[Chuck Engels]

Could have been a problem with your video driver, some of those issues were fixed in the 9.01 patch.
Glad things are working correctly Brenda, let us know if that problem pops up again.

[brenda]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the patch fixed things for good.

The good new is, I was finally able to import my Hawaii footage from last spring, which I had begun to believe was unusable. My Sony DVD camcorder really flaked out on the trip, and I couldn't even import it using Streamclip because it had so many timecode errors. PrE 9 finally imported it, although I had to devise a work-around. None of the presets worked properly with my Sony mini-DVDs shot in SD widescreen. They would come out 4:3, with black bands on either side. I hit on the idea of going into properties/motion and stretching it into widescreen (unchecking the box to preserve the aspect ratio) and found that re-setting the width to 133.4% corrected it to widescreen.

Thanks Chuck - and Steve and Ron - for ALL of the help you've given me these last couple of years! Muvipix membership is SUCH a BARGAIN!

Brenda

[Steve Grisetti]

Now THAT'S a true compliment! Thanks, Brenda!