How can I proactively prevent A/V stutter before starting a project?

Question

For the teeming masses who have iMovie projects that won't playback without stutter, there are several great solutions spelled out here in
"Stutter in iMovie 5 & 6 — causes and workarounds":
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2597033#2597033
And thank goodness for Karl Peterson and the rest of the folks who figured it out. I only wish I had read the posts earlier myself, as trying to figure it out myself was maddening!
I used Karl's strategy of "Divide and Conquer" for my 50 minute iMovie5 video that had lots (70+) extracted audio bits and imported songs. I've had to cut it into 4 separate project pieces so far, and it's helped.
Now for my question: I have hours of raw tape just waiting for my next project. I'd prefer to not deal with the stutter issue work-arounds, for as good as they are, especially if you are done with a project, they are awkward if you are editing an entire project at once.
It appears that the number of extracted audio clips is the big culprit in causing stutter...is there any smart way to go about editing my project from the start and somehow avoid extracting audio or work around it?
I suppose one solution is just to set up the entire movie project as many smaller ones, with each one having a "managable number" (on my G5 it seems like that's only 20 or so) of extracted audio clips. But I'm just a weekend home-movie warrior, and due to usually poor advance edit-planning & last moment decision making, I'd like to be able to edit any part of my movie from start to finish at any time. Also, I have iMovie5, which doesn't allow for multiple projects to be open.
And again, thanks to all who have stuck with it in helping with the stuttering problem!

Answer 1

Hi again,
I've sort of answered my own question a bit. The way I was in the habit of editing was to mute the audio of the video track, and extract any audio I wanted to keep, even if I wasn't physically separating it from the video track or moving it elsewhere. So I returned to my project, and clicked on the video clips in the timeline whose audio I had extracted, and lifted the audio levels from 0% to 100% and tinkered with the levels/fades from there. I didn't know you could resurrect the audio after extracting the audio; I pictured them as two separated parts of a whole. Score a point for non-destructive editing. Anyway, after that I trashed the extracted audio and it played perfectly.
Of course, if you are moving around audio portions away from the original video clips, I still think you need to extract the audio. With certain projects you may have to do that a lot, leading to known problems. So I guess my original question still begs a discussion!?!
Garrett