Premiere Elements fails to open new or existing projects

[Simon Child]

I've used Premiere Elements 12 on Windows 10 64 bit for a year or more. A few weeks ago I went to open it and found I cannot either start a new project or open existing projects. Whichever I select it just hangs and does nothing.

If I select the Organiser then that works OK, but if I select the Video Editor then New Project it does nothing other than show me the stripy progress indicator for a minute or so then stops even doing that.

It is a valid licensed copy.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled, doing registry clean in between. On first startup it asks to validate my license online and I agree. That appears to work, but maybe doesn't work well enough because then it crashes. I've reinstalled twice and it has done this both times. On next startup it doesn't ask me to relicense but it doesn't do much at all, as above.

I've updated to 12.1

I've disabled antivirus, and have reset windows firewall to default settings

I've renamed "C:\Users\xxxxx\Documents\Adobe\Premier Elements", to reset preferences

What else can I try?

When in the Organiser if i look at system info it tells me I don't have Acrobat reader installed. I have Acrobat Reader DC installed. Is that relevant? Do I have to downgrade to Acrobat Reader??

Thanks for any suggestions

[Steve Grisetti]

Do you have an nVidia graphics card?

[Simon Child]

Hmm, yes I do...

Prompted by your question I've googled and see that this may well be the problem. I did install it at around the time this problem arose. Ironically I installed it (GTX 970) to try out DaVinci Resolve instead of Premiere Elements!

It would be convenient to have Premiere Elements working for quick edits, but not so convenient that I want to buy an upgrade to a later version of Elements. Are there any workarounds I can try to get it working with this Nvidia card in place?

Thanks

[Steve Grisetti · Accepted solution]

Have you manually gone to the nVidia site and installed the most recent drivers for your card as well as this hot fix?

GeForce Hot Fix driver version 376.48 | NVIDIA

[Simon Child]

Wow, I was sceptical that a driver update would fix it as I had installed up-to-date drivers on this old card when I installed it in November, and even more sceptical that a games-specific hotfix would make any difference.

But I just installed the latest (14 December) drivers and Premiere Elements 12 now loads and opens a new project!

Thank you for your help with this.

[Lannydc1]

I am currently having the same problem.  I have a new PC (Windows 10) with an Nvidea 1080 video card.  Editor hangs on startup and eventlog shows an error in PremiereElementsEditor.exe.

I have installed the very latest driver for my video card.

I've installed Elements 11, 13 and the  2019 and they all have the same issue

I've reinstalled from Premiere from different sources

The hotfix listed above is no longer available.

The issue is recreatable but I have no idea how to resolve this and am looking for some help.

Thanks

[Peru Bob]

You can try different driver versions from here:

Download Drivers | NVIDIA

[Lannydc1]

Thanks for the suggestion.. I tried the oldest driver on your link and it failed too.  I also did a clean install of the latest driver.  All without any success.

[Lannydc1]

It turned out that permissions on my new PC were not set correctly for Documents\Adobe.  I changed permissions to my useri with full control.