As it says in the title, I just reinstalled Vista Ultimate 64bit. I was having numerous problems, most common were IE freezing a lot and my video editor (Sony Vegas 7) not rendering out my files properly.

I have an HD capture card and I'm trying to make a montage of Halo 3 gameplay. Of course I'm editing in HD and made a project file that lasts about 2 minutes. When I got to 2 minutes I went to preview it. Luckily I saved it before I previewed because as soon as I started to play it nad played maybe 2 seconds then froze, Vegas threw up an error and then the program closed. I tried multiple times with multiple different configurations, and nothing worked.

So I reinstalled. I install Vegas again and I try to render out these files again...same exact thing. Sometimes it can get past the first pass (I render out with 2 pass VBR), but most often it gets a couple of frames in and then shits out.

Before the error it was giving me was that I didn't have enough memory. I have 8GB of memory. Even if Vegas is a 32-bit program, the total size of all the recorded files is only 1.39 GB, meaning that the 3.25GB limit of 32-bit shouldn't have any effect.

What's pissing me off the most is that I've put almost $4000 into my computer, so there's nothing I shouldn't be able to do, and yet I can't do this! Right now I've managed to make it render by deleting half of the clips I had edited in on the timeline, bringing the total length of the edit down to a little more than 1 minute. That's the extreme limit of what I can do. If I try to add anything else onto that, or import that project file into another poject so I can render them together...nothing, it freezes instantly.

I can't imagine a virus that would infect Sony Vegas, I wouldn't put it past anyone though, but I'm sure this has to be a virus. What really grinds my gears is that I'm careful. I don't go to any stupid sites, I have virus protection, I run a scan every morning and it always comes up clean...what could have happened?

Now, I've been reading some other sites and posts here and I've seen that a virus can survive a format if it's in the MBR. My question is this, I have 4 harddrives.
I have a 1TB that I use for storage, a 500 GB that's partitioned into 3 drives, one of which is my boot drive, a 200GB, and a 40GB. How will I know which disk the virus is on? I mean, the MBR would only be on the boot drive, right? Makes sense. But what it the infection is on another drive. I will not format these drives, I've got 5 years of precious data that would kill me to lose, and I've got nowhere I can back it up, since most of the drives are very close to full.

I suppose I could take everything I've got on my partitions on my 500GB and put it on the TB, but if one of the files on the 500GB is infected, then it'll get on the 1TB, right? What do I do! I need to be able to use my computer without issue. I've put WAY too much money into this thing to have it crap out on me. How can I clean the MBR and make sure all my other drives are virus free without losing any data or formatting any of the other drives? How can I tell if the infection is on another drive?

Please help me!