Digital Home Thoughts: Adobe Premiere Elements 4: Crash, Crash, Crash

The short version is that if you're seeing errors like this:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Adobe Premiere Elements.exe
Application Version: 4.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 46df9114
Fault Module Name: nvd3dum.dll

Then you should uninstall your NVIDIA video card drivers, reboot, and install the latest drivers. Using DriverCleaner.net isn't a bad idea either - video drivers always seem to leave pieces of themselves around after an uninstall.

If you're seeing an error like this:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Adobe Premiere Elements.exe
Application Version: 4.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 46df9114
Fault Module Name: ntdll.dll

Then it might be from the preset you're using to render your video. I have no idea how a custom preset I had for a high-quality h.264 video could possibly cause an ntdll.dll crash, but once I deleted and re-created the preset, it started working again.

And, yes, once I finish this video editing project, I'm going to take a look at Sony Vegas - Adobe rarely if ever releases patches for their consumer-level software, so I want to get off the roller-coaster of buying every new version of Premiere Elements hoping that the new version will be something I can rely upon.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. On my second editing project I tried doing the YouTube upload and it took five attempts, four of them crashing on ntdll.dll. When I finally got that uploaded, I next tried rendering an h.264 file, and it continued to crash on ntdll.dll for the next eight (!!) attempts. When I was opening the program again after one of the crashes, I saw a new crash error I hadn't seen before:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Adobe Premiere Elements.exe
Application Version: 4.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 46df9114
Fault Module Name: UIFramework.dll
Fault Module Version: 4.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 46df819d

I suspect that's more of a random crash than anything related to this particular problem. After eight attempts to create the h.264 file, I rendered it to a DV-AVI without a problem. When I attempted to render that DV-AVI file to an h.264 file, it completed without a problem.

I really dislike this software.