"Unable to open project file" Error Message

I pulled an all-nighter (13 hours of editing) last night to create a critical project in FCE 3.5.1 on my Intel iMac running 10.4.11 then left this afternoon for a few hours and shut down my machine. Came back tonight and tried to open the project (which I saved on my Maxtor 1 TB external drive along with all of the scratch disk files). To my absolute panic, it won't open the file now with an error message that simply says, "Unable to open project file". HELP!!!! Anyone have any suggestions?!?!

In the past I found (and reported to Apple Feedback) the same bug Steve reports here, but I should recall that the problem:
- only appeared in PAL projects (probably not the case for kscritch) - never heard of it in NTSC
- was consistent in FCE 3.x, not so in FCE 4
I made tests importing .psd images with transparency into PAL projects using FCE 4, and I had various behaviours: sometimes the project worked, sometimes I couldn't open the project again (as in FCE 3), sometimes I had error messages with inconsistent behaviour (msg like "file error", but the project opened and file was there...), etc. so I decided to do without.
Now I only import .tif or .png images when I need transparency
Piero

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