Media encoder is taking about 20 mins on average to begin rendering a file. No matter what the project, sometimes longer. Just says loading and takes forever to start. ofcourse It also fails a lot.
Getting this message when i click for more info after a fail:
Could not read from the source. Please check if it has moved or been deleted.

I opened the same project on another computer ( a slower laptop) and it started rendering almost imediatly. So something must be wrong.

Your profile says Vista64 and CS3. Unless Adobe has done a recent CS3 update, it isn't certified to run on that OS. Some people do it successfully; others have problems. I guess we'll see if anyone has run into this and solved it...

This is a common warning message in CS4, for the following reason: Error: "Encoding Failed. Could not read from the source" (Adobe Media Encoder CS4 on Windows) (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/407/kb407106.html)

I know you are on CS3, but perhaps this is a clue to some similar issue?

By the way CS3 works GREAT on my Win7RC 64-bit system, so keep that in mind if Vista64 doesnt work out for you.

No, Im talking about CS4 . And im thinking i need to do a full reformat of my hard disk to fix this. CS4 was working flawlessly before for about 3 months on my current system. THen after some update, things went not so smoothly any more and i cant get it back. Not ghosting, nor system restore can get the errors in premiere and Media encoder to correct back to the way they were.

Did you "turn off" the video preview in the AME? It slows things down.