In absence of being able to make much sense out of the Microsoft website, I am posting here for any gems of wisdom anyone might have.

After uninstalling Neo4K, updating Premiere Pro5 5.0.3. again and then downloading and installing the latest Neo, everything was looking rosy and in its place, exports were going like a dream. Then I tried Encore to burn a DVD-Video. It stalled and reported a missing .dll file, then lauched but did nothing except revert to the "open project" tile which was ineffective.

I was assuming it needed a latest download from Adobe as well and linked up to the internet to do this.

Then Windows took off and started to update itself. I let it run its course. When it came to shutting down all went well. The story was different when it came to starting up again. It laid down all sullen at the pretty circling coloured dots, shut down and then the machine rebooted, got itself in a loop and was obviously not happy. The gossip about W7 being bulletproof seems to be a bit of a fable.

This is the message when I tried a system restore. It seems system restore points reset to zero when an update goes through. I have only two restore points. One a few minutes from the update and at the update itself. :-

Problem Event Name Stand Up Repair Offline
Problem Signature 01:---- 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 02:---- 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 03:---- unknown
Problem Signature 04:---- 21200667
Problem Signature 05:---- Auto Failover
Problem Signature 06:---- 2
Problem Signature 07:---- Bad Patch
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033


System Restore did not complete successfully. Your computer's system files and settings were not changed

Details

An unexpected error occurred during system restore. (0x8000ffff)


If anyone has any advice, it will be muchly appreciated.

David.


You are not bad at your long-distance diagnoses. I probably need to apologise to the collective Cineform, Adobe, Microsoft et al as Windows7 seems to have healed itself - story below.

Furthur to my lamentations in the earlier post above, I stripped out things I had added one-by-one before getting the computer ready to take back to the vendor for the motherboard, memory and video card to be checked.

Finally, when the second hard drive with my files was taken out, the final boot-up went flawlessly. Then Windows 7 reported it had successfully system restored.

Goodness knows what it is, bad SATA connection? hostile HDD? I'll give another HDD a try.

This motherboard ( Gigabyte GA-H55-USB3 ) has five SATA ports. The video board is a Nvidia 470.

The vendor plugged the operating system drive to port 4. Port 3 is connected to the Blue ray CDROM.
Port 3 is connected to the eSATA socket on front.

I have had the Dataport25 docking bay (SI2K) connected to Port 3 or Port 2 with no apparent difference in performance.

The data drive was connected to Port 2 or Port 3 with no apparent difference in performance.

I substituted another drive and did a clean install of Windows7 and software on it. The same problem occurred. After a forced shutdown, then there were stalled bootups rioght back to not making it past the motherboard screen, the Windows rainbow, USB appliances dropping out, freezes.

Next step is to try another drive as data drive which is a bit of a pest as my stuff is on the drive which seems to provoke the tantrum.

If anyone can offer any clues to shepherd me away from any dead-ends, advice remains appreciated.