Extremely slow loading projects

We're running CS3 on an HP xw6200 with 2, dual-core processors, 4GB RAM, plenty of drive storage. Have been through all the tweaks and configuration tips on here and on Adobe's CS3 forums, including removing the OpenGL plug-in.

Also tested all hardware and confirmed it's fine. (motherboard, RAM and hard drive are all brand new, replaced by HP under warranty less than 2 months ago).

We use VelocityQ and typically use .dps files on timelines as well as photoshop comps, and possibly .tga, .jpg or .tif files...and occasionally a quicktime shot from a stock library.

The problem is certain projects take literally 5 minutes to load. Once loaded, these projects have trouble during preview renders and with general stability, occasionally crashing the program.

Many, many other projects (equally complex), run fine with no issues of any sort. We cannot identify any significant difference in terms of project files, plug-ins used, etc.

We've tried one by one deleting plug-ins from the project, deleting various project files etc. to try to get to the root of the problem, all to no avail. We've tried importing these projects into new projects with no improvement.

I'm sure it's probably something so simple that we're just missing it, but anyone else experience this with certain projects?

One difference I've noticed is the problem files all have Quicktime movies in them along with the .dps files...but we have other projects mixing these that work fine.

Could mixing certain quicktime movies with .dps files in a CS3 project cause this kind of slowdown? We've done all the codec checks and we have no broken or missing codecs, and the computer runs fine otherwise.

Any suggestions appreciated as this is driving us crazy.


Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com