please help! emergency!!! (crrashed ProTools won't restart)

[nonsqtr]

Hi all - PT 7.3 on Win-XP, HD3. The darn thing crashed, suddenly and unexpectedly. I wasn't even doing anything. I went away for a few minutes, and when I came back the computer was in a miserable state. The last thing I remember doing, is switching over the audio engine so I could activate the delay compensation. Then I got up for a cup of coffee, and when I came back PT was very unhappy.

But now I can't load any of my projects anymore. ProTools gets about halfway through loading a project, and just stops and hangs when it tries to set up the inserts. K ran DigiTest and all the hardware still seems to be working, and ProTools is okay up until the point where I try to load an old (existing) session.

PT seems to work fine "natively", that is to say, I can create "new" sessions with "new" tracks, but as soon as I try to open an old session, whammo. It always hangs right where the message box says "restoring tracks" and "activating inserts". Then if you hit the "cancel" button, the message box header changes to "(Not Responding)". Nothing more happens, but then if you try to shut down the machine you get the Windows nasty-gram "This program is not responding, if you press End Now you will terminate the program and lose any unsaved data". The only other info I have, is that if the session I'm trying to open is especially large, I might get another message box about "out of resources", and at that point the mouse becomes jumpy and periodic and the system response becomes very slow, and the computer doesn't seem to want to paint windows anymore.

But here's the bizarre part: when I go to my Task Manager, I find that my CPU utilization is near 100%, and ProTools is chewing up 99% of my CPU time, and that's when it's NOT DOING ANYTHING - it's just sitting there with a blank screen (this would be right after I start it up, but before I try to open a project).

Well, someone (from DigiDesign, I think) told me at one point that there were a couple of directories I could clean out, on my machine, when ProTools became confused like that - only trouble is, I don't remember their names.

Can someone please help alleviate my ignorance?

I forgot what exactly he said was in those directories - cached files or something (it's not the wave cache - those I know about - but it's some other thing he said was in there). But whatever it is, I hope it fixes the problem. Otherwise, does this problem sound familiar to anyone, and if so is there a fix for it?

Thanks!