Hey Kids,
I read through all of this as I had been having the same problem. Robert actually almost got the answer but I did change my RAM and update the driver to my GTX780ti as he suggested.
This is what worked for me. Auto save is the culprit. SHUT IT OFF. I save anyway, and I suspect most of you save continuously like I do, most of the time subconsciously. There is no need for Auto save if you condition yourself to save all the time. When you go to render, auto save wants to crash that party, party's over. Auto save every five minutes does mean crash is coming very soon. This happens especially when you use things like Auto Levels and Shadow highlight to pull up some dim video and you have the temporal smoothing way up, with scene detect and auto save kicks in just as you go to render. DOH! It crashed again. I even saw it go to auto save and I was simply clicking off an effect to get my cuts right before turning the effect back on to render. Auto save just wants to get in the way of production.
No more crashes since I shut auto save off.
I got an i7 hexcore, 24 gb ram, win 7, ASUS ROG RADR as my PC boot drive, 2 X 4TB 7200 rpm SATA III RAID0.
I will be rebuilding my hackintosh with two 750 GB Samsung EVO SSD SATAIII RAID0 as the boot drive and I suspect the same thing will occur with the auto save. Just shut it off and learn to save regularly. I have no idea why I even use auto save since I do save almost all the time. (Am I ruminating?) I was a little paranoid, opting to save right after a render before I figured this out. I was going to clear out the preview files and render again, then I realized, auto save not necessary.
If Premiere crashes again regularly, the I guess I will be wrong but since I shut off auto save. no crashes.
Also, FYI. Windows sucks and you better shut off the updates and I terminate a pesky little program that will choke premiere, AE and anything CPU and memory intensive. It's called "Trusted Installer." Do that after you shut off updates. This computer rarely chokes and yep, it was choking big time today. Windows will eventually pop your settings to download and install updates without you wanting to, since they do that and you will have to shut them off again. I can edit on either but Windows has some issues with hiccups on the play head. I shut off all antivirus/antispyware. That hiccup never goes away. I also leave all hard drives on because Dreamweaver crashes all the time if you don't make a custom power profile. I have just under 17TB total. I am now conditioning myself to change power options back to "balanced" when I am done for the day for if I don't, I will shorten the life of my nice hard drives.
Adobe, this is the second program giving me problems to the point it costs me serious time and brain power. I got brain power to spare but I'd rather be putting in into my work than playing games like this. For now, I am working around your bugs. Everyone else, shut off auto save and learn to save, save, save even in your sleep. I will be dreaming about saving tonight. I would post the crash report but it's almost 5 am and I should have been done a couple hours ago.
I hope this helps.