Imovie 4 Media files have disappeared!!

Hi,
A student of ours has been using IM4 to do a project, they went to do some work today and all of the files in the media folder are missing. I have hunted high and low but can not find them, has anybody had this happen to them!!!
They have been using a LACIE external HD to save their work,
Thanks,

What Karl writes is very true about the corruption issues with iMovie 4.
I work at a high school (as well as independently) with many, many projects on iMovie versions 2 through HD (and also FCP). We mainly still use iMovie 2 because of bugs and slowness (lag time after clicking e.g.) with the other versions. When we want to do sound work and put Ken Burns effects on stills, and also to create DVDs then we bump up to 4.
Today, for the second time this year, all the clips have disappeared from a media folder but this time from a project done in iMovie 2. It was the last project open before shut down yesterday, and it was the first project opened on startup today. Nobody accessed the folders to delete them and neither iMovie or finder trash were used.
The clips simply disappeared.
Like I said before, this is the second time this year this has happened and it is very frustrating to us and the students.
We run into many issues weekly due to the intense usage of the editing programs (such as strange quirks with the Ken Burns effect and random corruption of stills).
And we have quite a few workarounds built into our workflow to deal with these things, but have found no way to restore the disappearing clips. And outside of copying every folder to another location every day, I can't think of what would really safeguard us for this one. This is a very scary problem to have.
I'm pretty much editing on FCP five or six hours a day and while it is way, way more stable, there are certain things that crop up there too.
It would be nice if Apple would start a page on known troubles and fixes that could be accessed easily from the specific product's support home page.

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Imovie 4 Media files have disappeared!!

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