Hello all,
One problem can come from Visit trying to open too many files for the maximum open file limit of your OS. Mac OS, for example, has a very small limit. Try changing this with ulimit. But ultimately, you should try to find the actual error message. I think there is an option for Visit to output the errors to a file, but it's so long since I've used Visit that I don't remember. Probably someone else can fill that in...
Well it has -debug options... My first try (in case you have not done so yet) would be to start visit from a command line. I then spits out errors to stderr.
If it complains about mismatching HDF5 libraries, then it will also tell you how to work around this (the good fix is to compile with the version of HDF5 inside VisIt, there are include and lib directories inside of the VisIt install, the quick fix is an environment variable HDF5_INGORE_VERSION_CHECK or so).
Yours, Roland