Vegas 6 freezes / locks up while rendering..help?

[Adam Smith]

So I have been using Vegas for many years, since way back in the v4.0 days, and I have never had an issue with rendering until just recently.

The project I am working on is a video / audio presentation for a Police awards ceremony, and it's about 25 minutes in length. It consists of DV video, stills, MP3 and WAV audio, text and generated media. The timeline is 18 tracks deep, with several audio & video effects, pans, and velocity tricks. The total amount of source media is about 21 gb or so.

I am rendering to .wmv for the presentation, and MPEG2/AC3 for burning to DVD later.

PC is a Pentium dual-core 3.6ghz with 4gb of ram, WinXP SP2.

So here's the issue...every time I try to render the project, it freezes at around the 47 to 50% mark, and will no longer respond. The "time left" countdown goes to zeros, and the elapsed just runs and runs. It does it on different frames each time, and on different files. I have tried three different computers, and have moved the source media from external to local drives and vice versa to no effect.

I moved the timelines around, broken up the media into different chunks, etc, but haven't had any success yet. I might upgrade to V8.0 Pro and see if that helps, but I figured I would consult the gurus first.

Anyone had similar issues rendering? What should I look to correct?

[Adam Smith]

Ok, so I installed v8.0b, and rendered to MPEG2 successfully...I'm going to render to wmv and see what happens...I suppose my v6.0 install may have been corrupted, the jury's still out.