[Obsidian Dragon]

Sorry for your bad experience and frustration. Many of us have gone through some of this before but for some it works fine. Just some quick observations that might help to point to a problem.

First off I see you mentioned:

"When I ran Hard Disk optimizer, I got this error:

I did the hard disk optimizations
Ran as admin
error applying attributes: C: program files/commo... / alphebt.xml access denied.

(I chose to ignore all to get it to work.)"

That would indicate something didn't get installed or set properly in my opinion.

Secondly I don't see a second hard drive on the list. Protools should be used with a second hard drive for the session and audio files. The reasoning is that the OS and the Protools application on the system drive are constantly putting demands on the drive that interferes with a smooth data flow for multitrack audio streaming needed for Protools audio.

Thirdly: It is recommended to set the playback engine to use one less than the total number or processor cores you have. This sounds counter-intuitive but it really leaves some processor power to be available for OS activities and non-realtime processing. You don't want to dedicate all the processors only to realtime processing. Since you have a quad core i7, try setting the number or processors to 3 instead of 4.

That is my 2 cents but #1 seems to be the biggest culrpit that is causing your problems. Have faith as Protools does work on some systems and therefore is capable of working. Admittedly Protools is very picky about hardware and system configurations so it will take patients and time.

Good luck.