I am pulling my hair out and hope someone has an idea what is broken.

I have just tried exporting the same project twice from PPro CS5 thru AME as MPEG2-DVD. The first time, I enabled MRQ but even with my i7, it was going to take 8hrs to render; so, I ended that render and duplicated it with MRQ off. After about 30mins, my computer completely froze which required a hard reset. So, then after rebooting, I had to open PPro and create a new export because AME didn't have anything saved from the prior export.

This time, my PC froze within seconds of hitting 'start queue'.

Luckily, I had already logged into my studio HP Z800 and started the export on that PC with MRQ enabled. However, even with its 12cores/24 threads, it will take 2.5hrs to render, and then an hour uploading the rendered files back to me.

So, does anyone have an idea what is going on and what is broken? If you had to bet money, would it be on software related or hardware?

Hmmm...
I smell software burning.
I don't know how it would happen, but cancelling the first render & starting the second with MQR off might have triggered some sort of glitch in AME that it is not able to recover from.
I wonder if you can just reinstall AME alone.
If so, it might be worth trying.
It's always something ;(

You're not the only one....
Where to begin....


Are you importing a PPro Sequence?
What are the sequence settings and source footage?

As far as fixes, i would try getting PPro to purge any cache.
Save out a new PProject, and use the new one for importing the sequence...

The other workaround is to export the footage right off the timeline, to an intermediary codec, and use this as the footage to encode..

Sorry, these are workarounds. There's something obviously broken..Simply go to the Adobe forums, and type AME Hangs, and you'll find a million people with similair issues....

Well,
I'm not saying that this is a sure bet, but it will not harm your project in anyway (at least in my experience).
Sometimes when I have had "non explainable" problems, I have resorted to deleting the media cache files.
This did not harm my project in any way and and has saved me a lot of headaches.
Please bear in mind that this has worked in CS3, I don't know if CS5 would react differently

I would strongly suggest using some kind of intermediary instead of exporting directly to MPEG-2. I have experienced numerous issues with transparency with the direct output, and for some reasons they are not present if I go via uncompressed or DV.