PT Wipes Away Without Any Notice/Pop Up !!!

[xiolablue]

OH S#@T ! I have never experienced this before and pray that someone is familiar with awful situation . I'm on an imac with 4g of Ram 300g HD.2 LaCie external hd.os 10.4.11 ptv7.4cs9 1st generation 002 console. I bring up 1st generation for a reason ( more in a sec ).
I just finished a session away from home with success ! Not a single problem ( just the burden of transporting most of my home studio gear to a remote location ).Today , I was tracking drums for my own band . I set up 12 audio tracks to record . No plugins / auxs / anything ! As bare as it gets . Recorded 4 min .
When I went to have a listen , I clicked on the timeline ruler to somewhere in the middle of the song and I noticed that my counter was frozen ! I pressed spacebar to stop . I pressed spacebar again to play back again to see if the counter would work properly and WHAM !!! Pro Tools was gone ! It sucked away exactly how it does when you hide a window on a mac . When I looked at my dock , NO LITTLE BLACK TRIANGLE ! Not only did it pull away my screen but PT had QUIT. NO WARNING , NO ERROR WINDOW ! Since I was in the middle of tracking a drummer with limited time , I had to keep going so I made sure PT quit , TRASHED MY PREFERENCES , restarted my cpu and opened the track to keep on truckin . Seemed fine , was able to record but THANK GOD FOR COMM + S ! I immediately saved when the song was done but as soon as I started clicking different parts on the song , PT would disappear ! NOTHING SAVED ! After the drummer left I spent an hour opening other sessions on my external hd's and the same thing keeps happening over and over ! It's always when a song in playing back . If I click somewhere else , it craps out ! The counter in my transport freezes and " SEE YA ! " Granted I'm clicking around on the fast side but this shouldn't be an issue. It never was before . And even if I shouldn't be clicking around without stopping playback first , WOULDN'T I GET AN ERROR OF SOME SORT ? ( sorry about all of the exclamations and caps , I'm just baffled and partially screwed at the same time )
These are the only things I could think of......

1. Could this be happening becaused my power harness is F%$#ED ! I know that all of the first gen . 002 and some of the 2nd and 3rd have the dreaded " Power Harness Issue ". I don't think this is the case because I recently bought some DeOxiT and DeOxiT Gold , opende up the 002 , cleaned the prongs and re adjusted.

2. Could it be from a bum firewire cable ? Or a bad drive ? The reason I don't think that it's this is because I was soooooo frustrated that I opened that session and pulled the firewire to the 002 ( i know I know , not smart ) but anyway , a window popped up like I thought it would ! And my external drives ? I've never had a problem as of yesterday !

3. Every plugin I have is purchased or a free one from Digi like Structure Free but recently , for the first time ever , I downloaded some free LEGAL rtas plugins from the internet. Could this be the cause of the sudden disappearance of Pro Tools ? I'm stumped and it keeps happening ! I've searched the DUC.

ANY HELP OR SUGGESTIONS WOULD BE MUCH APPRECIATED !!!
Thank you and have a great day

[oulablank]

bump

[dougied]

It could be all or none of the above. Start checking your compatibilities with everything. Plug-ins with your version of PT, PT with your version of your OS, De-Oxing your power harness won't fix the problem... you might need to call Digidesign on that one for a replacement (check the Digidesign support page for that info). Are you running an Intel iMac or PPC G4/G5 iMac? There are waay too many variables here so we need to start at the source.

[oulablank]

intel imac. Would a problematic plugin screw things up just by being on the cpu ? Meaning , not even inserting it anywhere on the session ?

[dougied]

It could be. Go to the General Troubleshooting page on the DUC:

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=54888

and start there. Plug-ins can be a problem if they aren't compatible with your version of PT.