vegas80.exe APPCRASH

I have an update:

When I launch Vegas, the splash screen comes up and it gets as far as "Creating file I/O manager..." and then stops working (i.e., it crashes).

What Vegas is doing is loading a set of file I/O plug-ins that each support a given file format (AVI, MPEG, etc). By a process of elimination I have determined that the offending plug-in is aviplug.dll - the one responsible for AVI file support. Temporarily removing this plug-in from the appropriate Vegas folder allows Vegas to launch properly. Of course, that's little comfort if AVIs are your video format, which mine are exclusively.

I have Microsoft Visual Studio on the computer and so I can break into the program and see where it crashes. It's very interesting. Basically, it's crashing when some program/driver/module is checking to see if it is running in a virtual machine (e.g., VMWare Workstation).

The only thing I can conclude from this is that a codec on the system (either Video for Windows or DirectShow) is checking to see if it is running on a virtual machine (perhaps in violation of a licensing agreement).

On another Vista 32-bit system everything runs fine. The next step to isolate the offending codec (if that is the problem) is to compare machines and then systematically disable those which are only on the problem machine. But I really don't want to do that for obvious reasons.

I have submitted my findings to Sony's technical support. I'll post any developments.

John.