Premiere Elements 7 freezes, haults, blows up, etc.

Question

I have recently purchased premiere elements 7.0 and I am not happy with it. I have a Dell XPS system with 2GB Ram, and over 200GB of free space on my hard drive. I am creating a movie with JPG's from my Canon DSLR that have been downsized them to 1024 x 680 before putting them in. My movies have been downloaded from a Sony Handycam HD camera to the wmv format before bringing them into Premiere Elements. I render my pics and movies everytime I put around 10 into the project and then do a save. I have tried to create a 3 1/2 hour movie on DL DVD's but this program seems to blow up all the time and eventually won't even load the project. I have exported small projects to avi format and reloaded them, which seems to work but after converting to wmv then exporting to avi and then bringing them back into premiere elements, the movies seem blurry. I decided to cut my project in half and I still have memory problems. Premiere says I am running low on memory and better save the project. When I check how much memory I have left, I have 760MB left. I have even closed everything on the task bar. I continue to get memory problems when I don't have memory problems, or the program elements.exe blows up with a "software exception (0xc000000d) occurred in the application at location 0x78138aa0). My most recent problem is that I was finaly able to put together a movie about 1 1/2 hours, rendered it, put my theme into it and saved it. Now I am trying to burn, with everything shut down in the system, just elements running and I can watch the memory start at about 1.5GB and it goes to about 650MB and the burn stops, and the program disappears from my screen. I have tried everything adobe says to do on their KB site but nothing seems to help. Anyone have a clue.

Answer 1

Thanks everyone for your help. I think I have found a way to make PE7 work with a system like mine. Read below:
I'm trying to put a movie together using JPG's and WMV movies. I have about 450 JPG's that I made all 720 width by using PS7, I let PS7 pick the hight. The movies came from my Sony Handycam HD camera and I used the Sony software to make them into wmv movies. I put them on my hard drive. Why did I use wmv - for some reason, when I used the Sony software and downloaded the movies to MPG, the sound did not come with them. As I said before, PE7 could not handle all my JPG's and movies (total of about 4 hours worth). I was hoping to put a 4 hr movie on a dual layer DVD. Forget that. I couldn't even put a 2 hr movie together. PE7 sometimes just went away on the screen, or I received a C++ error, or memory getting low when I still had 750MB's of memory left and 100GB left on my hard drive and just either froze or disappeared from my screen. I couldn't even move the movie bar too much without PE7 crashing. I found that as I worked in PE7, trying to put a 2 hr movie together, l would have to load about 10 JPG's, do a save, then render them, do a save, bring in about 5 movies, do a save, render those. I kept doing this for days, but as I got about 1 hr worth of movie, PE7 would crash all the time. I finally got 1 hr and 50 minutes all saved and rendered with all my markers, etc. Ready to go right. Wrong. When I tried to burn, the encoding right before the burn would blow up all the time and I couldn't burn the DVD. Days and days of trying to produce a movie and PE7 would just blow up everytime.
My system:
Laptop - Not the best for PE7
Dell XPS M1730 Dual core, 2GB Ram, 200 GB HD with 120GB left to work with PE7, 512 Geforce video card. PE7 says this is enough - wrong
OS -XP with SP3
Everything turned off on the task bar.
About 1600 MB left of RAM to work with
This system exceeds PE7 requirements but it is not enough.
Here is a way to create a 2hr or 4hr movie with the system I have:
Continue to load 5-10 jpgs, save them, render them, load 5-10 short movies, save the project, render the project and save the project. Don't go to long without rendering and saving your project. Continue until you get to about 20-30 minutes worth of movie in your project. Do NOT put any markers in because they will be lost when you do continue to do what I did to create a 4 hr movie. You will do them later. Now go to File and export to a Movie. This will put it in AVI format. Once it is saved, start another new project. Start it where you left off and do the same thing again and again until you have all your AVI movies. I ended up with 5 avi movies. Now start your last new project. Get Media (grab each avi file you saved). Put them in order. Now you can put in your markers, title, etc. and shouldn't have memory problems. You're ready to burn. It worked. I finally have a 4 hr movie through PE7 with the system I have above. I forgot to say, I also run a program called FreeRam XP Pro (free shareware). Before starting my burn, I would use FreeRam XP Pro to free up memory. Many times after a render and save, I would use FreeRam XP Pro to free up memory.
I wish Adobe would let everyone know how PE7 really works. You would think by the ads, that my system would work properly. I hate to see how PE7 will work doing HD type movies from my camcorder. I will have to experiment with that one later. Right now, I am tired of working with PE7 over the last 2 weeks.
Again, thanks everyone for helping out here. I hope this helps some others that are frustrated with PE7.