IMovie Partial Hang

Question

My daughter, who has been using iMovie for the last 1.5 years, recently ran into a "partial hang" in her new project. The symptoms are that, for a particular movie, the application doesn't respond to any mouse manipulations of buttons or slide bars or to select any clips, etc. On the other hand, the menus can be opened and scrolled through, and certain operations such as emptying the wastebasket can be done by choosing the item on a menu.
This hang occurred after several hours of working on a fairly small (about 20-30 minutes of clips) moview, during which time she added many transitions, special effects, titles, and so on. After the first hang, she started another movie project, re-imported the clips, and the hang occurred after several hours of working on the new copy.
Interestingly, she can quit iMovie with no trouble and re-open iMovie. If she re-opens the same project, the project screen doesn't appear on the screen until she clicks on the Finder and then re-selects the iMovie app. She can also open any other movie project and it seems to work fine. It's worth noting that, for the movie project that hangs, the CPU utilization is not high, we have 60Gbytes of internal disk left (the project is on internal disk) and memory usage (we have 1.5 Gbytes) is low.
Even more interestingly, while playing around with the hung movie project, I successfully emptied the movie project trash, and that seemed to unhang the project. After experimenting with a few things, I saved the project and quit the app. However, when the movie project was re-opened, it was back to the hung state. I've been able to unhang the project temporarily again by saving the project under another name.
We are currently at version 6.0.2 of iMovie, upgraded in early July. Our MacOS level is 10.3.7. This project is the third project she's started since the upgrade, although its true that she hasn't completed any of them yet so the hang may still appear in some of her other projects.
We don't have much other software installed on the iMac, although Macromedia Flash and Adobe Photoshop are installed.
Does anybody have any advice?

Answer 1

hi Jody, Karsten again (Karl is the other one, the really smart, I'm just talking smart ... ),
please follow Karl's advice, given in the mentioned link, you just have to read his first 4 - 5 chapters, esp. "workarounds"...
2) … besides that "too many audio clips cause stutter" - video needs LOTS of diskspace... a computer (and iMovie...) can show the same symptoms, when your drive is "full".
switch to Finder, select your drive by single-clicking on hit and hit the two keys "Apple" and I (as Info)... tell us, what you read in "avaliable disk space"... a guess from remote here is, you drive has very little free disk space... "little" reads as "less then 5 - 10 GB" - yepp, GB, not MB... a Mac needs at last 5 - 10GB free on internal drive (ext. drives don't count...), just for running smoothly....
tell us a little more...