IMovie - takes over an hour for Import window to appear

I'm running latest version of Lion and iMovie 11 (9.0.6, I think) on my i5 21" iMac with 12GB RAM.
For the past few months I've had issues with iMovie being extremely unstable. It sometimes crashes in the middle of working, I get spinning beachballs that last for 10 minutes or more, etc. The biggest problem is importing video.  Any method used to import video causes iMovie to freeze and beachball for any where from 10 minutes to over an hour.
I've experienced this with AVCHD or iFrame footage on SD card, HDV from camera via FW or when clicking File/Import to grab video stored on disk.
All of these cause iMovie to spin and spin for an hour before I can even select what video to import.
So far I have:
1.  Taken iMac to Apple Store, they did archive and install. Worked fine for two days, then problem came back.
2.  Created a new user account, used that for iMovie, that worked fine for few days.
3.  Deleted prefs, fixed permissions.
4  Removed all projects and events.  This is not really an option as I am in middle of a project.
I don't have the 3ivx codec on my machine.
I'm about ready to try a clean install of Lion, provided that I can redownload the installer package.
Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing these incredibly slow import times?

Hey
Just as long!  One thing that maybe causing it is that this is a company com
puter with access to long in remotely. Maybe there is done sort of connectio
n trying to be made? But I don't see anything in the system preferences that
would suggest that.
Not going to restart again unless it will help the problem. Can't loose that
much time in the middle of projects.
Nothing is checked to startup at login=
Any suggestions as to where else to check. Ive run disk utility and the disk
verifies.
Lisa

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