TMPGEnc Plus will not complete encode on my system

[emman]

What I am doing:
MPEG2 to MPEG2 changing the bit rate small amounts. ie 6 Mb/s to 5600 mb/s VBR. Source is hardware encoded MPEG2 from a Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. This device has some problems but for the most part works well on my system (see profile). I will list several questions or observations that may allow someone to pinpoint a problem in my system. I am about tapped out.
Problem:
TMPGEnc Plus 2.511 will not complete encoding a file. Problems occur at different places on the video files. I did get one 11 min. system video + audio to encode at CBR.

TMPGEnc Plus 2.511 installer version tended to cause errors in operation and crash or spontaneously reboot the system. May be a driver conflict?
TMPGEnc Plus 2.511 self-extracting file does not crash it just stops responding and you can kill the program with the task manager. The difference might be because I had switched from VBR to CBR.

I also had problems with VideoSudeo 6.3 encoding also but deactivating the LAN appeared to fix that problem but had no effect on TMPGEnc.

I have tried stopping all TSRs, LAN and everything I could with no effect. Changed video cards after removing drivers. Gforce4 4200Ti to a SIS 315 chip set also no effect.

Thing I have not done yet.
I am encoding on a single drive with 50GB free. I have other drives but have not installed them. Would this be a likely cause? I need to try a MPEG file with a known good format. I will look at the samples. When TMPGEnc reads the file it detects bottom field first - 4:3 525 line (NTSC, 704x480) this is not how it was captured and no other program reads it that way. Would it be useful to configure try the memory not running in Dual Channel mode and deactivate the Hyper Threading?

If you decrease the bitrate naturally the file size decreases but should the file size not also decrese when you go from 720x480 to 352x480 at the same bitrate? Mine did not and these settings behaved differently in the differently downloaded programs.

Any comments and additional things to try are appreciated.

[klined4lyf]

If you decrease the bitrate naturally the file size decreases but should the file size not also decrese when you go from 720x480 to 352x480 at the same bitrate? Mine did not and these settings behaved differently in the differently downloaded programs.

Bitrate, commonly measured in bits/sec, or kbits/sec is just that - the number of bits per second. With regards to constant bitrate, CBR, decreasing the resolution will not affect the file size. The bitrate and the length of the video detemine the file size, since bits/sec * sec = bits, which is your filesize (or size of an A or V stream). What decreasing the resolution for a given bitrate DOES do is allow the encoder to use the same number of bits to represent fewer pixels, which might manifest itself in a viewable quality change (for the better).

K