Loading bar stops near the end

Hi,

The most recent project I'm working on will not load any more. The Loading
Project... progress bar goes most of the way to the end and stops two 'blobs'
from the end then does nothing else; no disk activity that I can see, nothing. I
can click Cancel to be taken back to the opening panel.

It was working last night. Now none of the project files will open for this
particular project, nor any of the Autosave files; they all exhibit exactly the
same behaviour. Other projects from last month, last week, two years ago, etc
all open fine, it's just the current project that freezes like this.

I've ruled out a hardware fault or project file corruption because all 30 files
wouldn't just break simultaneously while other projects are fine. The only thing
that's changed in the system are a whole bunch of codecs. Long story short, I
was having serious codec playback issues (audio missing, jumpiness, or refusal
to play in VLC/Media Player etc) so after days of hassle I just went through
this morning and removed pretty much all the codecs except the default ones
shipped with XP.

I then reinstalled the latest versions of ffdshow, ac3filter, mpeg2, mp3 and ogg
codecs. And now my project won't load, even after reboot / cold start. My guess
is it's trying to do something, load something or verify something in this
project that's now missing as a result of my, ahem, tinkering. I can load the DV
files into VirtualDub and they play fine. I can mess about with them, transcode
them in SUPER and they play back in Media Player fine, it's just opening this
particular project file that stalls.

The question is: what is it doing at that point in the loading process? Can I
find out? Is there a log file I can scour to find out an error message or
somehow work out what part of the system it is complaining about? Anything I can
do to track down why it's crying? There are no error messages I can see, and no
indicator of what it is doing at that moment.

One quick trick is to rename the folder that has your source clips so that PPro
will not be able to find them. When you open the problem project and PPro asks
you where the clips are choose "offline all". If your project now
loads then let us know.

Cheers
Eddie
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Thanks for the tip Eddie. Sadly, it doesn't even get that far :-(

I renamed the folder containing the footage but it still hung on the Loading
Project... progress bar. Totally baffling.

My money's on some random misconfiguration in ffdshow or something, but I can't
afford to waste any more time diagnosing it. Think I might have to admit defeat
and roll back to an old restore point from a few weeks ago. I knew my policy of
keeping _all_ data off the OS disk and only letting system restore monitor C:
would (kinda) pay off one day!