I was having a minor problem, I don't even ermember what it was now! I thought it might be solved by trashing some settings so I removed MC State and Site Settings. Relaunched Avid but it hung. Would not respond to repeated attempts at CTRL-ALT-DEL. SO I manually powered down. Then Windows would not start, not even in safe mode. It hung when trying to load a Promise driver.. a long message ending with "System32\DRIVERS\dontgo.sys". Apparently something was corrupted during the manual power cycle.

Eventually I ended up doing a repair/reinstall of Windows and now everything appears to be back to normal.

Of all programs I have ever run, Avid seems to be the least responsive to CTRL-ALT-DEL. I hate having to manualy power down, but sometimes it is the only way. Is this your experience? Are there any ways to avoid this kind of thing?

No.

I find that if any given program is taking too long to shut down after using task manager to shut it off I go into the process tab and shut down dumpprep (or some similar name) the programs generally shut down right away after that.

Great Tip I will have to try it sometime.

mcabery:

I find that if any given program is taking too long to shut down after using task manager to shut it off I go into the process tab and shut down dumpprep (or some similar name) the programs generally shut down right away after that.

I find I always have to use this procedure when Avid freezes or crashes.

Avid writes a logfile reporting program status when you have an illegal exit either by crashing or forcing a quit from task manager.  Shutting that process down aborts the operation.  It means that it will not be possible to debug the issue should you wish to.

One cause of slow writes to the logfile is that it's become too big.  I'm at home so I don't know where they're written to currently, but you can speed up forced exits by moving your logfiles to a backup folder.  New smaller, faster ones will then be written as required.

 jwrl, when you get a chance would you please post the path. I'd like to try that on Monday.

Will do.

C:\Program Files\Avid\AvidApplicationName\ You are looking for the folder:  "AvidFatalErrorReports"

 Thanks BLKDOG, that's where I'd expect to find them. Just wasn't sure whether or not they had been "relocated".

Ditto