Despite bugs I've complained about previously with Vegas 8, it's still been stable for me overall. Until now. With a new OS installation it now freezes, and at one point it froze and the music stuttered super fast and then Windows (XP Pro 32bit) crashed after 5 mins, diplaying a full page message (I wish I'd made notes).

I have deleted the page file, reinstated the swap file, but it did nothing.

The original video lies on RAID 0 drive with nothing else on it.

Any thoughts?

It was a bad hard drive...problem solved.