Constantly Crashing!

Question

Hey everyone.
This is my first post on the forums because up until recently everything has been working great. Let me try to give everyone as much prospective and history as possible so you can better solve my issues.
I do some small time freelance work in Final Cut, mostly cutting together screen captures for a client that makes software training videos. The final videos are exported to medium quality animation settings so he can run them into Flash and ultimately post them on his website. The files I'm working with are a standard NTSC format, at 640x480 res. The typical video is between 3- 7 minutes long if that give you an idea of size.
My normal work flow is to finish all the editing first and then set up a batch export to Quicktime to send over the 30 -50 videos at once so I don't have to babysit my computer.
When I started doing this I was running Tiger with FC 5.01. Everything worked great! A little while ago I upgraded to Leopard and started seeing my system running a little slower and occasionally my computer would lock up and force quit when trying to do the batch export. I figured that I was having compatibility issues running the latest greatest OSX with an older version of FCP - so last week I bit the bullet, shelled out some cash and took home the upgrade for FCS 2. Eight install DVD's later I was excited to be able to function again and finally finish my current batch of videos for my client.
Boy was I wrong!! I immediately ran into numerous issues. Number one: EVERY TIME I opened Final Cut NONE of my preferences were saved and it forced me to reenter my serial number. Not a huge deal, but frustrating nonetheless. Thankfully I found a wonderful post on here that addressed that issue and it is taken care of. However, upon launching it still doesn't recognize that I've opened it before (nothing saved in the recently opened projects tab) and I still haven't registered it - Comcast screwed my internet on the night of the install. Typically this would not be a big deal because every 5th time the program opens it's supposed to ask if you want to register. However, if it doesn't remember that it has ever opened then it can't possibly count to five to ask if I want to register. Again, this isn't a huge deal, but that shouldn't be happening and it's a little obnoxious. So, that's problem one.
Problem two - It still has the same freezing issue with exporting large batches. So, I guess that means I spent the money for no reason which sort of hurts. No one likes spending lots of money to not resolve anything!
To make matters worse, I developed a new problem on top of that! So, problem three is that now occasionally when I drag a clip into the timeline, and EVERY TIME I try to just jump from once place in the timeline to another (for example from the beginning of the clip to the middle of it) I get the "pinwheel of doom" and FC crashes. This simply will not work!!!
I'm pretty sure my computer can't possibly be called a dinosaur yet, it's only a couple years old! I'm running a Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5 with 2 GB of RAM and 750 GB of hard drive space.
If anyone has solutions to any or all of these problems I would love some advise!!
Thanks for taking the time to read this saga.

Answer 1

Thanks for helping out guys!
In response to both of your posts:
Michael - I did do a disk repair and a permissions repair already and I run a program called Cocktail (very similar to MacJanitor) on a weekly basis.
I know, I should probably just upgrade the Ram to something a little more impressive than 2GB. Unfortunately I don't have the extra cash right now - especially since I just bought Final Cut! That will definitely be my next upgrade though. I guess it may be coming sooner than I thought....
John - You are correct, I only did the upgrade and install when I updated to Leopard. Since I did a complete install of the Final Cut after the OS upgrade, I would have figured that would been fine. I may have to go back and try again though if nothing else works.
I tried deleting the preference file and that worked perfectly! Thanks for solving that problem!
Also, after I registered I ran a software update and got a Final Cut 6.0.2 (thanks for listing that in your specs John!) and installed of the other Pro App updates. That seems to have helped the situation a bit. My timeline issues seem to be sorted out and working just fine now, however it still doesn't want to export.
I'm starting to think there is some sort of problem with the particular videos that I'm trying to export. My original project was a total of 380 videos for about 12 different programs. I managed to export (before the upgrade) 350 of those videos. I'm down to the last 30 and none of them will go peacefully. Possibly not-so-coincidentally all of the remaining videos are for the same program and were originally captured by the same person. Although I doublechecked my settings and they are all the same these videos will not export to Quicktime.
Just to test further, I tried exporting one of the other videos, that previously worked, a minute ago and it worked just fine. I then tried to re-edit one of the bad clips (now that I can use my timeline!!) and although I was able to edit it, the video locked up again during the export.
I'm starting to think the isn't really a problem on my end.....
Thoughts?