I downloaded this MPEG-2 video file. It shouldn't have been MPEG-2 but it was for whatever reason. I have PowerDVD installed so that is my MPEG-2 decoder. I open the file in TMPGEnc Plus to convert it to compliant VCD format and it opens just fine. Even the encoding proceeds normally though very, very slowly. Much slower than usual. About 10 hours it says it will need to encode 1 hour of video (1 hour would be normal on my machine).

Then about 1/4 of the way through the encoding, my computer starts spitting out all these warning dialogs saying this and that system file doesn't exist and I need to reinstall Outlook and all this other seemingly unrelated stuff and ultimately the computer restarts itself!

This has happened 3 times and each time the encoding has halted at the same point. After the restart, everything is normal again and working fine.

I've bypassed the problem by sending the MPEG-2 to TMPGEnc through AviSynth which has sped up the encoding about 10x, but I'm just wondering why this happened? Anyone got any theories?