Lightroom 2.1 crashes - 4 times so far

[Scott_Quier]

Equipment:
AMD Athlon 4600+
2 GB memory
WinXP, SP3
Two monitors, hosted on a WinFast PX7600 GT (from Leadtek)

LR 2.1 - Trial version, not yet plunked down the $$ for a product key

So, I'm thinking LR is going to save me some time if I can only get my brain around how it works - should be simple enough. Just shot a wedding on Saturday and I figured I would jump in with both feet - what have I got to loose but a little time?

So, I import all 1,800 photos (RAW, Canon 40D and 50D) - no problems. Took a little time, but I just went and fixed myself some breakfast and when I came back it was done.

I'm digging my way through the stack in the "Library" module, flagging some as keepers and some as definite garbage (P, X) and once in a while opening up the second monitor for displaying an image. Sometimes, I'm displaying a few images side-by-side to determine which of the set is the keeper.

I'm about 100 images into the stack and all of a sudden the area used to display the image goes gray and in the lower left corner, in red foreground color is printed (mirror image - as in backwards) something about a memory error. Being the anal OCD freak I am, I've been running Windows Task Manager and the memory use is in the neighborhood of about 1.1GB - lots of room left over.

OK, I shut down LR, reboot Windows (a hard, cold restart - remember, I'm a little OCD about somethings:D). Once XP is stable again (OK, go with me on this ...) I start up LR. Not 20 minutes later, LR freezes - solid. Only way to shut it down is via Task Manager, in the processes tab no less.

Repeat the last process (restart, yada, yada) and LR goes TU again.

OK, I'm done with LR until I can figure out what is going on here. BTW - CS3? Working just fine - no worries.

Anyone got any ideas on the next step to figure out what's going on here. I THINK I would like to transition to LR, but only if I can get it stable.

TIA

[Ann McRae]

Sorry to hear that Scott. I really, really like LR2. Hope you can work out the problem without giving up on it.

It drags and hangs sometimes, and that is annoying, but it has never crashed on me.

I know there are folks that are talking about this on other forums, so maybe looking elsewhere will help :dunno

[Ric Grupe]

Do a search for nVidia and lightroom.

I remember when I had the trial that I needed to change a setting from dual monitor to single and that made everything work better. Maybe LR doesn't play nice with dual displays. If I remember correctly, this is an nVidia only driver issue.

[John Mueller]

Crash and burn every time with dual monitor display.Very annoying I know.
I switched back to single display and it works better.
Sometimes now when I have a lot of files it will crash also.
I don't remember it doing it as bad with 2.0?

[Scott_Quier]

If it turns out to be a dual monitor issue - well that would make LR a none starter for me. I just got my second monitor at home (I've had a dual set up at work of a couple of years now) and I'm not going to give it up!!!

But, I'll look around and see if I can find some answers.

Thanks for the leads.

[John Mueller]

I have never been a fan of LR but got sucker in with all its hype.
My biggest complaint was about dual monitor support.
I got what I was looking for and now I can't use it:rolleyes

[Ann McRae]

Maybe some help here:


http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showforum=31

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/

http://www.lightroomforums.net/

FWIW, I use LR with dual monitors (mac OS) and do not have this issue.

ann

[Ric Grupe]

If it turns out to be a dual monitor issue - well that would make LR a none starter for me. I just got my second monitor at home (I've had a dual set up at work of a couple of years now) and I'm not going to give it up!!!

But, I'll look around and see if I can find some answers.

Thanks for the leads.

Perhaps an ATI video card would do the trick.:dunno Like I said before...I think it's a compatibility problem with nVidia chips...which is what you have.

I will probably get LR when I decide to go with a 64 bit OS...not yet though. I have a relatively fast setup and LR is too sluggish for me.

[pathfinder]

Scott, I think with that many images, you might find better results with significantly more RAM.. 2 Gigs seems marginal to me at best, and with over 1000 images, more RAM is gonna be better (I bet ).

I have well over 50000 images in my LR2 catalog for 2008 and it does not seem to lag or be slow at all......

I have only a single monitor though

[Scott_Quier]

Scott, I think with that many images, you might find better results with significantly more RAM.. 2 Gigs seems marginal to me at best, and with over 1000 images, more RAM is gonna be better (I bet ).

I have well over 50000 images in my LR2 catalog for 2008 and it does not seem to lag or be slow at all......

I have only a single monitor though
Thanks for the response.

This is a new, fresh install. At the point when this crashed, the catalog had less than 2,000 images in it - so I don't think it's catalog related.

For the most part, I agree - mo' is better!:D That's why I made mention of the, relatively, low memory consumption. At the point when it crashes, I don't think the O/S had even started to dip into the virtual memory yet. And, it's not like I was displaying all the full sized images. What was displayed at any one time was a series of thumbs in the filmstrip and up to, maybe, five larger previews but only when I was comparing a few of them. Bridge seems to handle the same scenario without an issue on my computer. I'm confused.

The more I read (Ann had some wonderful links that I followed up on - Thanks Ann!) it appears that my issues may be caused by a combination of a number of factors:

Maybe low memory - but I don't think so
Dual monitor set up - but I have friends that run in simlar configuration all day long with no issues:dunno
Nvidia based card vs. an ATI based card. This could be. And it could be that the drivers are not the most recent. I'll be looking into that this weekend.
I've read that it could be caused by a flacky install - one that's not been refreshed in some time and/or a corrupt registry. This install is only about 2 months old and I've not been installing/removing any software since the refresh.

[eoren1]

Hey Scott,
The only other suggestion I have is to visit the LR User to User forum:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc2cf0a/
And search for the error message you are getting. I tried a search for 'dual monitor crash' and didn't see much that seemed relevant.
Good luck.
E

[Scott_Quier]

FWIW - I did some quick research and found that the driver I have been using has a signature date of 2/1/2006 (yup, some 2.5 years old). So, some google work later, found that the Nvidia site has a much more recent driver set for the GeForce series of chips, 10/15.2008. I just installed it and it seems to be running nicely. I'll be giving it a real test later this week. More later.