ATR:
Thank you for detailing the access to the chat facility. With all due respect to your efforts I must say the entire Adobe Support Structure must be an attempt at humor because other than end users who hav to purchase software with real money to contribute I have not seen anything that works. I just made three attempts at chat by entering long detailed descriptions of my problem/problems and finally someone said they were experiencing problems with the entire system and it would not be available till the 12th. I had tried previously 3 or 4 times and EVERY chat session was a complete waste of time. Either the connection was interrupted or the person on the other end was attempting every avenue to avoid dealing with the problem I had spent considerable time detailing. I used to receive excellent support onLightroom and Photoshop but this Premier Elements is a total goat rope that has me considering other options.
Regarding my present problems I really see the need for some form of internal trace mechanism in Premiere Elements to show what is happening when projects fail to load. When I watch the failure in task manager PE12.1 shows active then I see the application hang event failure and nothing else. An internal trace facility is only available from the non existent support structure and I see no other way to fix this other than some form of internal trace in Win8.1 showing PE12.1 activity. Like I mentioned before I found this same problem on PE10 and a Adobe Techinician connected to the machine and did undocumented repair to resolve it but apparently that level of support doesn't exist.
Still willing to purse preview files and conformed audio/video.
Bob