Access vioation after CPU upgrade

[SteveFireland]

Hi all,

My singer recently upgraded his Dell Dimension from an AMD 3800 to an AMD x2 4800... all seemed to work fine for a while, but in the past week or so, he's getting lots of "Access Vioation" errors when opening projects. It seems to happen randomly (and frequently) and isn't related to one specific session - sometimes a session will open fine, the next it won't, the next it will etc.

When this error occurs, you can't shut down Pro Tools because it prompts you to save the session - and when you choose save or don't save, you get the access violation error again. You then have to use Task Manager to kill Pro Tools and reboot the machine.

We trashed the prefs, checked the disk, upgraded from 731cs3 to 731cs5, trashed the prefs again, checked the disk again, tried swapping out DIMMs (he also upgraded to 3GB from 2GB while putting in the new CPU) - none of which helped.

No other program seems to be affected by the upgrade, so I'm not sure if it's CPU-related, and I just upgraded my own machine from a AMD 3800 to an AMD x2 4200 with no probs on PTMP 731cs3.

Another oddity is that Pro Tools will not save his preferences now - if you load it up, go in and set the plugin list to show by Category and Type (for example), shut it down an open it up again, the setting is lost. The PTP file in \Application Data\Digidesign has the right timestamp so it's getting updated alright - it just doesn't pick up on it next time it starts up.

Any ideas? My next course of action would be to drop the old CPU back in and see if that rectifies the problem, but that causes so many other problems (all his sessions are just too big!) it's not really a fix.

Full reinstall of PT perhaps?

Cheers,
Steve.

[sunburst79]

Did you delete the Digidesign Database from each mounted drive? I know you memtioned trashing the prefs.

[spkguitar]

Not saving preferences is usually a sign of not having Quicktime installed. Pro Tools requires Quicktime for a number of activities, so Quicktime needs to be installed. Not having it installed could technically also cause Access Violation errors.

Another issue could be plugin compatibility. Some older plugins were not coded to be used with multi-core processors and can cause errors if not updated to the most recent versions.

[SteveFireland]

Thanks guys, I'll try those ones out. Quicktime sounds like a bit of an odd one - it's never had Quicktime installed and it used to save the settings!

Cheers,
Steve.

Edit -----------------------------------

A bit of searching and you appear to be quite correct about Quicktime!

http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.p...v=#Post1211417

That's still seems a bit odd to me...

And I notice I spelt violation wrong in the subject, d'oh! Damn £3 keyboard from Tesco!!!