After revisiting Windows Movie Maker 2, I found it to be buggy.
The possible reason it was crashing on me the first time around was I had been putting too many scene-clips from the scene library onto the time-line, which it uses to generate the movie output. I restricted the amount of scenes I copied to the time-line, and saved the project every time it copied each scene grouping. (Even with 512 megs of RAM, I was surprised that this was such a slow process, also!)
The end result of WMM2? Many scenes had the audio unsynchronized to the video. Most of the result was pretty good, but overall, a definite THUMBS DOWN.
I will have a close look at three other programs: Pinnacle Studio 9 (thanks, Richard), Movie Edit Pro 2004 (thanks, Windle), and Sony Vegas 5 + DVD Architect Pro Media Suite. I might look at Adobe Premier, too (thanks, DeepC).
I'll post my results once I work through them.
Cheers,
Ray Darr