[610FFM]

meanwhile I completely reinstalled ProTools 8.0.5 LE under WinXP Pro 32-Bit after I deleted all unnecessary drivers that were not in use at the time (by generating two new environment variables "devmgr_show_all_unsued..." or the like... think you know what I did since this is a common tweak to remove these 200 drivers from all USB-sticks you ever connected since the installation of your system)...

I found out that there were around 20 unused Digidesign MBox Pro drivers which I certainly removed. So again: after removing all unused drivers I completely removed all traces of ProTools from my disk after uninstalling it and had it set up completely fresh. Also I am running the latest BIOS for the board, didn't read so far about trouble using a TexasInstruments chip for FireWire (which means I could also have been using the generic BIOS for my board and nevertheless shouldn't experience any issues...

but: same issues over and over. That freakin' very same address 0x03ddcb2d in ProTools.dll still is mentioned in the error-message on creating above mentioned new tracks. What the hell is it?

A friend of mine told me it could be the NUMA-architecture of my board that didn't affect ProTools 6/7 so far. NUMA stands for "Non Uniform Memory Access", which means that every CPU on my system (since I have two sockets) will be able to access it's directly accessible memory on ONE way and the memory which is connected to the vice versa other CPU on ANOTHER way. In clear speech this means: everytime a thread of either one CPU is running out of memory (or more memory that is physically installed directly at this very CPU) it will have to access the lacking memory over THE OTHER method to be able to reach it over the other CPU - and THIS might be the failure at 0x03ddcb2d - because THERE IS NO FRONT-SIDE-BUS on my system.

See on the one hand I have 6.4 GB/s per CPU with HyperThreading from AMD Opteron which is great for most 3D-applications which makes this a very good board. But on the other hand the Front-Side-Bus-Architecture of Intel might better come into play here, because then I wouldn't have to worry about NUMA at all.

Well I know this is all a bit difficult to understand since y'all ain't programmers like me and most of y'all might not have the experience with several Intel or AMD architectures. But I am known to all of it: Mac PowerPC/Intel, AMD, Intel, Sun whatever it is: I've seen it, programmed it, used it.

But somebody please tell me: this NUMA issue should really be something that the OS should take care about, shouldn't it? ProTools 6/7 obviously didn't have these issues because they (assumedly) were using the built-in XP memory managers - ok, understood.

Nowadays that everyone is heavily going 64-Bit and is writing their own assembly-style methods to access the memory there's no budget in programming it for Intel and AMD seperately. And THAT exactly is what I am experiencing here - please correct me if i'm wrong.

I was also told that I wouldn't have any of these problems switching to Windows 7 with my AMD system using ProTools 9. But I AM having an MBox 2 Pro, a Windows XP Pro system in 32 bit, although my CPUs are 64 bit, okok. So more and more of my friends keep telling me to switch to Windows 7 and even more people keep telling me to keep my hands off of Mac OS X 10.6, because it doesn't perform so well like I'd like it to be on 64-Bit with various systems.

No question for me is: Front-Side-Bus sucks... I mean nobody really wants to have this. Just let me quote the main-board manual of the Tyan S2895 here :P:
"Three HyperTransportTM links per
CPU, support up to 6.4GB/s data
transfer rate each link"

Guys - this was great until ProTools 8! What happened? Is it possible for me to run ProTools 8 on my system at all? I'd really appreciate a pro's oppinion on this, who has seen it all, programmed it all and really can tell me what to do (otherwise I wouldn't ask here but I could also ask everybody else). I would listen to everything that certain somebody is telling me because I want to get my freakin' system back to run ProTools and I really don't feel like downgrading to PT7 now because they have software-based memory-controller issues... I mean: it ran in PT6/7... what about PT8/9 now? I just want an answer: do I need to downgrade to PT7 because my system just does not support PT8/9? Do I need to buy Win7/64 to get it to run? Do I need to switch to the Intel Xeon platform? Or what? Thanks for reading this and for your time - but please: if you have anything in your mind that could help me - please tell me :P

best regards,
Giovanni from Frankfurt / Germany