xMedia 2 gets weirder and weirder

1. With all my catalogue problems - the current one had just been build a few weeks ago afresh - I happened on something really weird: though I have more and more photos in it [d'uh], my catalogue get smaller. Originally my working cat was about 600 MB, the rebuilt one came out ca. 350 MB, now [without me doing anything] it is at 162 MB.

2. At the same time xMedia seems to get more sluggish though I cannot say this is a general thing, it's just that at times the whole machine gets slowed down, xMedia doesn't respond anymore. I think, but am not sure at all, it is [some] cat savings. Curiously sometimes saving is just an eyeblink. And yesterday as well as today xMedia took a time-out for more than half an hour, hindering other programs, i.e. ProcessExplorer, to be launched. Since xMedia didn't respond in any way, I couldn't check what it did; since PE couldn't launch I was unable to check through that.

3. xMedia set to use WIC for OTF rendering of previews of my image files. This worked well for NEF [D2-series], TIFF, JPEG, BMP, JPEG2000, DNG, PNG - until yesterday. Suddenly I found myself getting only a black light table, after a while the thumbnail with the circular arrow appeared. This was with an NEF; testing on another NEF it worked like a charm.