If you have visited the nVidia website, you may have seen an advertisement for vReveal and installed it to test out CUDA. The lastest version of vReveal with newly added h264 export support causes PowerDirector to halt with a runtime error message. The only way I've found to work around the problem is uninstall vReveal, or unregister the h264enc.ax codec that vReveal installs. After I'm finished using PowerDirector, I can register the codec again so vReveal can use it.

I created a CMD file with the following commands to automate unregistering the codec, running PowerDirector, then registering the codec:

regsvr32 /s /u "C:\Program Files\vReveal\h264enc.ax"
PDR9.exe
regsvr32 /s "C:\Program Files\vReveal\h264enc.ax"

I saved the CMD file in the PowerDirector root directory where PDR9.EXE is located.
I created a shortcut on my desktop to run the CMD file, which I named PDR9.CMD

That is for Windows XP Pro (32-bit), SP 3. I don't know what the commands would be on any other system.

Gateway DX4380, AMD A8-5500 Quad Core 3.2GHz with ATI Radeon HD 7560D; 16GB RAM; 1 TB SATA 7200 RPM; Windows 8 Pro 64-bit; PDR11, PDVD12.