I am running VDL:2 on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz computer with 512MB ram operating on Windows XP. I installed the program, and everytime I open it, my screen goes blank about 5-10 seconds later and is replaced with a blue screen that says ";Windows has been shut down due to a fatal error."; It has given various reasons for the crash on different occasions (corrupt drivers, page fault errors, etc.). It listed two drivers in particular:
[b]p16x.sys[/b] and [b]portcls.sys[/b]. I've reinstalled the program several times and tried updating my sound drivers with no success. Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated.

Those are definitely your sound card drivers causing the crash, not VDL2. Not every company puts out good drivers- by typing in those file names into google, it seems they crash quite a lot with various programs/games.

Yeah, I realize that. portcls. sys is a Windows audio driver, and P16X is a soundblaster driver. I read that it may be because of Windows Service Pack 2 that the driver is malfunctioning, so I'm going to attempt to roll back the driver to a pre-SP2 version. I'll post later whether or not this works in case anyone else has this problem.

Reverted back to service pack 1... STILL does not work. Have been trying for 3 days. Haven't even been able to use the product. Am I the only person in the world dealing with this problem?? This is nuts :shock:

When I ";upgraded"; (if you can call it that) to XP SP2, it killed a lot of my ";pro"; applications. Things like Adobe After Effects and Alias Maya as well as some audio programs no longer worked correctly- some wouldn't even run at all. I ended up reverting to SP1 and it all worked again. Later I reformatted my hard drive and installed Windows XP, updated to SP2, and then installed all of my programs and everything worked fine. I believe it has to do with SP2 being a major security update and perhaps not being friendly with other software.

But since you're problem is definitely a driver issue, do you have a computer where your soundblaster is a PCI card that can be removed, and use the integrated sound card on the mainboard? Maybe you have a friend with a completely different kind of sound card you can pop in your machine just to try troubleshooting a bit.

Finally. Another reboot, and it works fine. Will never install SP2 again. Creates nothing but problems... Program is great! I stayed up til the wee hours of the morning trying it out. Thanks Tapspace... you guys have done percussion arrangers everywhere a great service.