IMovie cannot import iPhoto at all

Question

I'm unable to import any iPhoto content at all into iMovie.  I'm running iMovie 11 (9.0.4) and iPhoto 11 (9.0.5) on an iMac running OS X 10.7.1.  The basic problem is that iMovie is not able to load iPhoto content into the photo panel.  It just hangs, seemingly waiting to access a server it can't access and I don't want it to access.  Here's the sequence, which 100% reproducable:
Neither iMovie nor iPhoto are running.
Delete the file com.apple.iApps.plist from /Users/<user>/Library/Preferences.
Open iPhoto.  No problems, no matter how many times I start and stop iPhoto.
iPhoto has re-created the file com.apple.iApps.plist.  Delete it.
Open iMovie.  No problems, no matter how many times I start and stop iMovie.
The file com.apple.iApps.plist has not been created.
Click on Show Photo Browser.  iMovie says "Open iPhoto to see photos from your iPhoto Library in this list."
Launch iPhoto.  The file com.apple.iApps.plist has been created.
After about 30 seconds a dialogue pops up with the title 'There was a problem connecting to the server “gigadrive”.' with the text "The version of the serer you are trying to connect to is not supported.  Please contact..." etc.  "gigadrive" is a Linksys Gigadrive NAS that apparently doesn't support the DHCAST128 authentication method in Lion.  Fair enough.  But the Windows boxes on my home network do use it, so I can't just get rid of it even if I wanted to.  This dialog box never stops popping up no matter how many times I dismiss it, which is infuriating.  I can simply shove the dialog down into a corner w/o dismissing it and that at least stops the irritating behavior.
Exit and iPhoto and iMovie.
Relaunch iMovie.
Within a couple of seconds that damned dialog box starts up.
Click on Show Photo Browser.  The Photos panel spins forever, never loading photos and never erroring out. 
No other apps bring up that server error dialog.  The problem appears to be centered around the file com.apple.iApps.plist, which does not contain any reference to gigadrive. 
I just want iLife to stop trying to access the gigadrive server.  What can I do?
-Russ

Answer 1

I finally found a solution for my issue.  The basic problem is that I had created an iPhoto slideshow using photos that were on the NAS and hadn't elected to copy them into iPhoto.  So I iPhoto was loaded with photo references that it could not resolve because it could not access the drive.  This took two steps:
I got rid of the slideshow.  Since clicking on it caused the pinwheel of death, locking iPhoto, I followed this solution
Get rid of the photo references.  I used the Rebuild Library feature of iPhoto Library Manager.  This app has the smarts (that iPhoto lacks) to ignore references to non-existant photos.  After it ran for about an hour it told me there were 140 photos is could not resolve and pointed me to the OS X console which listed the "lost" photos.  I renamed the rebuilt library to the iPhoto norm.
Now iMovie starts up with no problem and I can once again access iPhoto photos from iMovie.
Apple really needs to address this problem.  I've found lots of references to it.
-Russ