Crash when rendering

Question

I am running a CS4 9.0.2.42 trial. I successfully rendered my video which is about 4 mins long. Then I needed to make some changes, which I did and tried to render it again. Now if freezes part way through the rendering process. So I tried to break the video into smaller pieces so it does not have to render as much and I get this error and After Effects shuts down:
"After Effects error: Crash in progress. Last logged message was: <3420> <ae.blitpipe> <2> rect t:0.000000 |:0.000000 w:0.000000 h:-71.000000"
"After Effects can't continue sorry, After Effects has crashed. See http://www.adobe.com/support/products/aftereffects/html for known issues. If you still can't resolve the issue, please contact Adobe Technical Support (2).
( 0 :: 42 )"
I checked the link it gave me, but it did not help.
All of the videos I am working with are all wmv files using whatever compression that windows movie maker uses. I have some jpg and bmp in the background. The rendering settings I changed are:
Lossless with Alpha
Xvid compression
Audio to output turned on
Other than that I left the rendering settings alone since it worked for me before.
I am using:
Windows XP Media Center SP 3
2 GB memory
1.86 GHz dual core CPU
NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT video card
I know it isn't the best system for using AE, it does take about 40 mins to render a 4 min video, but in the past it did actually render the video.
Anyone know what is wrong and how to fix it? Please keep in mind, I am very new to AE and I need you to make your answers as detailed as possible, I don't know much about video rendering either, I just know what worked before and am using it again. Thanks.

Answer 1

If I were you, I'd trick that machine out with RAM.  2GB is NOTHING in AE-Land.  Heck, the operating system's using about half of your memory.
Other things to do:
If you're using Open GL  to accelerate renders, turn it off.
If you're trying to use multiprocessing, turn it off and LEAVE it off.  A 32-bit machine can only see 4GB RAM, and that's nowhere near enough to use multiprocessing.
And since we're talking about AE 9, it could be the footage, too.  I'm pretty sure wmv files qualify as problematic, so I'm going to paste in an answer I give a lot on the Creative COW:
Dave's Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is  any  kind of the following -- footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVCHD, mp4, mts, m2t, H.261 or H.264 -- you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information.  However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information.  Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
I'm a Mac guy, so I like to convert to Quicktime movies in the Animation or PNG codecs; both are lossless.  I'll use Apple's Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder or Quicktime Pro to do it.
How come things worked okay up until now?  You got lucky.