This may one of those times where a call to Adobe may be in order.
I have never had PPro terminate as the Render progress bar window opened - but if it happened to me, this is what I'd check. First I'd see if PPro tried to warn me about dropped frames (if you see a little red icon bottom right, clicking on that will reveal a list of dropped frames). If that's all cool, I'd expand the timeline at each connection with another file a see if I really did butt it up against the next clip. If that looked ok, I would begin to suspect my system, especially when it comes to rendering effects. Since it aborts really quick, do you have some effect, like a speed adjustment in the first clip? Look seriously at your first minute or so.
Before calling Adobe I would try a new sequence with one file from that project - you could have the unexplicable 'corrupt project' file somewhere. If you can't get an mpeg to render as an mpeg then you know somethings up with the whole project. If that works - try to render a few larger sequences. My guess is that, at some point, you'll get to the part of your project that PPro is taking offense to.
I have read a few suggestion on forums that you may find out what is going on by check your computer system event log. I've never found that to helpful but you may understand that stuff.
Actually, I did have a render problem once, but with a different program, and it turned out to be a RAM problem. New RAM card, no problem, but in that case I got an error code, which of course made no sense to me, but when I googled the code I got some info.
I can't think of anything else to try...
