Playback dropped frames - worst when re-starting computer

I'm editing a short 3 minute project - DV-NTSC sequence - and am getting those **** occasional dropped frames during playback (not in the same place) and cannot figure it out for the life of me.
I'm new to editing and am using FCE HD 3.5
New mbp 15" 2.16, 2 Gig Ram, 160 hard drive
10.4.9
Seagate 400gb ext. drive (325gb free, FW800, Mac OS Extended, journaling off) built by OWC (Mercury Elite Pro al) w/ media, waveforms, thumbnails, etc
Settings: Safe RT, Dynamic video quality, Full frame rate, Real-time Audio Mixing to 4 tracks - low quality playback.
Canvas/viewer etc are not overlapping. Am viewing at "fit to window" size
Easy setup - DV NTSC - and all my media is DV/DVCPro - NTSC, with 48khz, 16-bit audio. Some files are anamorphic and I've changed distort and motion to make them fit 4:3.
Activity monitor shows FCE using 20-36% of CPU during playback.
Energy Saver set to Never sleep computer, Never sleep display, don't sleep hard disks, no screensaver - and am running Spindownfix. Universal Access is off. Firevault not enabled. No other programs are running
I am new to editing so please let me know if doing this could be the culprit: in some places have 3 tracks of video overlapping - not because i need to but out of laziness; in others have 3 overlapping video with a lot of keyframes adjusting opacity. ALSO: Am setting Au dynamics processor for lots of the audio - and also changing the level db in the stereo track for the same audio - should I be making these changes in the au dynamics filter instead?
Also, problem seems to be worse when I first re-start the computer - and tends to get better as I go along....?? (I assume its okay to restart my mbp without unmounting my external drive? - that it does that automatically?)
I am rendering everything (although isn't it supposed to play without dropping frames without doing so?) At one point, my project wouldn't let me render portions of audio (they were marked red, but nothing would happen when I tried render all audio or mix down etc). I trashed my preferences and that seemed to fix that problem.
I feel like I've tried everything. I'd really appreciate any advice. (Since the problem isn't all that frequent, should I consider just taking off the "report dropped frames" warning until I'm closer to a final cut?) This is a new machine, so if its a hardware problem i definitely want to get it fixed sooner than later. Thanks!

The first thing I'd try is to mixdown audio (alt-cmd-R), and see what happens.
In addition I wouldn't leave overlapping clips unused in the tracks, even though I'm not sure it makes much difference.
Piero

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GRAB 2 CAM SAVE AVI TTL SEND C-P LOOP 0.1.vi ‏151 KB

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Playback dropped frames - worst when re-starting computer

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