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.
Wow you tried all the worse ones.
Cyberlink Power Producer is great.
Adobe Premiere Elements is really good too.
If slides are what you want Proshow Gold is the best..it does video too, but not very well.
The WIndows Movie maker was probably the easiest to use in your list, but it’s not powerful enough> I found the two above (Cyberlink and Premier Elements) to strike a good balance between power and useability.
I like Imovie except I have some videos made by a machine I got that converts VHS tapes to DVD and it cannot read that format. I think have to get another software called Toast to convert them. But otherwise, I have really liked Imovie. I did have to find a little work around for some older .mov files from my Kodak Easyshare, but someone had posted how to do it out there on the vast and wonderful internet. :)