ok, another follow-up on all this. i installed the beta on my quad core, vista, 64 bit machine last night. i got the same errors i got on the single core, xp machine. the install works fine, including using the import method. all 'my filters' gets transferred fine and the install finishes and everything seems ok.
on double clicking to start up, i get the popup asking if i want to buy or 30 day trial. i pick 30 day trial and the machine starts cranking, trying to start FF2. this takes quite a while, i suspect because of the 5046 filters and a dozen or so environments and however many presets there are from vers one 'my filters' that have never been processed, cached or thumbnailed in version 2. whatever the reason, it starts eating vista's resources pretty heavily. finally, i get the error message that i've been sending in on the automated bug report form. i'll get this every time if i try to repeat the startup.
so, what i have to do to get FF2 to work is remove all the imports and uninstall FF2. i then reinstall without any imports and it starts up just fine. in fact, it starts up faster than FF1. then, i can import my custom environments, filters and presets from vers one as long as i dont put more than about 1500 in at one time. the real limiter seems to be system ram. vista has the little cpu usage gauge and ram usage gauge and i watch those as i load things in and try to start FF2 again. if the ram usage percentage goes over 60%, FF2 will crash. i even reset ram usage allowed in FF2 to 70%, but it still crashes if ram usage goes over 60%. this is a one for one thing. it happens every time no matter what i'm doing in FF2.
and, since this is the same error i was getting on the single core, xp machine, while doing the exact same things, then it's not something systemic to any one version of windows.
and, as i said above, it doesnt matter if it's just the initial loading of FF2 with a lot of new stuff to process, it will also crash on 60% once i have everything loaded in and seemingly working ok. as i scrolled down the list of 'my filters' in order to get their thumbnails working, the ram usage started climbing again and when it hit over 60% again, FF2 crashed again.
at first, i thought this might be a memory leak thing, but it doesnt quite act that way that i can see yet, so this seems to be more of a 'the swap file system of windows isnt working or working well and/or it's not fast enough to keep up and windows eventually just says, 'STOP!'.
now, once i got all the thumbs showing up and all the filters in place and all the environments and so on, and things had been cached a bit, vista then comfortably seemed to handle the load ok, the same as the xp machine.
oh, and as a side note here, there shld be a folder made during the install for 'my filters' and 'my presets' and 'my environments'. just put a dummy filter in there or something as a placeholder. the reason i mention this is, when i was initially moving the filters manually, i couldnt... sort of. more like i was afraid to because those folders didnt exist yet. i had to start FF2 again and make a dummy filter to get the program to make those folders. yes, i could have made them manually, but i also wasnt sure you hadnt moved things around on me the same way vista moved things around from 'application data' on xp to 'app data\roaming' on vista.
at any rate, FF2 is now working on my quad core. i did notice that since i'm 64 bit there that during the install it didnt offer any plugin feature to FF2. yes, i know that's a known issue. i'm just pointing out that it basically let me know that during the install, which is a good thing.
If wishes were horses... there'd be a whole lot of horse crap to clean up!
Craig
