Curious what 4 windows programs did you try?
Roxio Creator (came with my DVD player), Adobe Premier Pro (older ... like 2005), Avid Studio (~2003 vintage), Pinnacle (came with my Sony camcorder) and Windows Movie.
They were either too sophisticated, too buggy (crashed often) or too clumsy.
I had a bunch of short videos I had shot of taking my parents on a Carribean cruise for their 50th anniversary. Shots of them arriving at the airport, us packing for the cruise, boarding ... debarking at various stops ... stuff like that.
I just wanted a 5 minute ‘memory’ and spent weeks trying to get it put together. Gaaah! Either the background was too loud, or too quiet, the music didn’t mesh, the transitions were horrible. So, after weeks of working on this for an hour or so during the week - I just gave up.
Then, my friend showed me iMovie on his Mac Mini; and we put together a short video in about 15 minutes - and it looked professional in every way. iMovie has canned plattens you just drop your video/stills into; and it does the work. Utterly painless - and actually quite a bit of fun.