Media Encoder 2018 won't launch, Win 7

[KevinB944]

After months of successful use of Premiere and Media Encoder, Media Encoder stopped launching for me, and instead reported "The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000005)..."  I realize Adobe doesn't want to support Windows 7 starting with its 2019 version, but I'm still running the 2018 versions; surely someone has found a fix for this.

I tried moving forward & back revisions and found I could re-install Media Encoder 2017 successfully, but it can't be launched automatically from the Premiere 2018 version that I'm now stuck with for my current projects.  In an attempt to really kill the problem dead and get both on 2018, I reset my Windows machine to factory defaults and re-installed just the basic programs today, including a web browser, Adobe Creative Cloud, Premiere, and Media Encoder.  ME 2018 still fails to launch with the same error message, both with ME 12.1.1 and 12.1.2.

Premiere has complained in the past about the nVidia card and drivers, but I haven't had any issues lately.  I thought surely a re-installation of Windows would get me back to 100%.  Thoughts?

Machine:

HP ZBook 17, i5 processor, 2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, Service Pack 1

Graphics card:  nVidia Quadro K610M

-Kevin.

[Shivangi_Gupta]

Hi Kevin,

Sorry for your issue. Please try these two steps.

1. Run the application as an administrator.
2. Try launching the application after disabling the Nvidia graphics card from Device manager.

Let me know if it works.

Thanks,

Shivangi

[KevinB944 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the advice Shivangi.

This problem seems to come and go, and in this case of my original post I discovered I still had a pending update for the nVidia driver that failed with Windows Update's software.  When I got onto the nVidia web site and manually downloaded the latest driver (and restarted twice), both Premiere and Media Encoder 2018 started working again.

When this error comes up again (error code 0xc0000005 is fairly common with Premiere), I'll try your suggestions.

Does anyone have any experience disabling the nVidia driver, and how it affects Premiere?  I assume this engages the integrated graphics machinery, which is not ideal, but I usually edit HD footage, not 4k, so perhaps the nVidia driver is not critical.  (?)

Thanks,

-Kevin.