that program is world famous in the world of cinematography as being buggy and also an immense memory hog. you are absolutely not imagining your problem not even, in the words of Obama, a smidgen.
I do don’t know how much time you have invested already in learning all of the features of microsoft movie maker, however short of radically upgrading your memory or decreasing the number of clips my strong advice to you is that this problem is not going away.
I cannot tell you how many people have like you torn their hair out over this type of thing.
sony vegas is universally leave regsrded as providing more features and at least up to 1 year ago it was free the features of sony vegas are much richer and it is much less of a memory hog and you’ll be much much happier using it.
I used movie maker on a fast PC for about 1 month and I was constantly running into your same problem. My computer was crashing and when I switch to a different editing program those problems instantly went away.
stop using movie maker do not get addicted to it.
It’s like driving a Yugo in the Formula 1 championship.
I am a long time pinnacle studio operator. Never tried Vegas. What little, I tried Premiere, I wasn’t wild about.
I run 17 ultimate on an I7 dell with higher end video card that was on special when I bought the pc. W8 for all the drawbacks handles editing very well.
I used windows movie maker once or twice.
I am looking to go to 4K soon.