There's a component in Direct Show which caches the information about the
effects and transitions that are registered upon your system. Unfortunately
there's a bug in that component which causes it to crash if you have a lot
of transitions and effects installed. MovieMaker calls this routine on
startup which is probably why you're seeing MovieMaker crash.
Fortunately there is a workaround by doing something like the following.
1. Find an application which has registered a bunch of effect filters.
2. Rename the directory that the application is installed into to
something else - which will temporarily cause those effect filters to fail
to load.
3. Start MovieMaker. As less effects are successfully created,
MovieMaker should hopefully launch.
4. Rename the directory in step 2 back to it's original name so the
original application still works.
5. Start MovieMaker again. As everything was successfully cached in step
3 it shouldn't try to recache things so it should continue to work..
As an example of an application for step 1, I've seen people run into this
problem with applications installed from InterVideo. (This isn't a bug in
InterVideo's application - it's a Microsoft bug it's just that InterVideo
applications can install a bunch of DirectShow filters). In this case you
would go to your "C:\Program Files\InterVideo" directory and rename
"InterVideo" to something like "TempInterVideo". Then start MovieMaker. Once
it has launched, close it down and rename "TempInterVideo" back to
"InterVideo".
Good luck
Dean Rowe
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.