The application has unexpectedly quit???

Question

Hello,
I have been using iMovie, and iDVD for a few years now. Nothing fancy, just home videos, but I really enjoy it, and I feel very good when a project is done and I can share it with my family.
My most recent project is a group of iMovies based on the first 4 years of my middle daughter's life. I title each movie by year (1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993). Each movie has titles, transitions, soundtrack music, and "chapters" added, all standard iMovie stuff.
My problem is that this project will not work. The project starts out fine, just like always, with the little sideways barber pole spinning away, but when I come back several hours later to check on it, there is a window stating that the "application has unexpectedly quit" and asking me if I want to submit a report to apple. This has not happened before.
The first time it happened, I did all the things I have learned to do when iMovie tries to act up or give me trouble, specifically: I deleted the iDVDplist, I "repaired permissions", and I even ran "Cacheout X" and restarted my computer. But after all that, when I tried the project again, it "unexpectedly quit" again.
I don't know what to do now? I have read that many people have had trouble with iDVD chapters being placed at transitions. I thought this must be a problem with the new iDVD5, because I have always placed chapters at transitions (and at the very beginning of a project) and I have never had a problem before.
Since I don't know what else to do, I am going to go back and move the chapters around avoiding the beginning, and any transitions, and see if that makes a difference. Other than that, can anyone suggest anything else I could try?
Would upgrading to iLIFE '05 help? I actually own it. I have had the box sitting on my desk for months, but I have been reluctant to load it because of many of the problems that I have read about in these forums. In my case, iDVD4 has been working very reliably for me, and my thought was "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" Well, now it seems to be broken, so, should I try to fix it?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated,
Lincoln

Answer 1

Thank you David,
I appreciate your advise. As you suggested, I went back and moved all the chapters from each of the iMovies. I have never NOT placed a chapter at the very beginning of a project, and it seems strange for the "2nd" chapter to be listed as chapter #1 (since the first chapter "Beginning" is implied), but--- it worked!
It is hard to say exactly what worked, because I also created an entirely new project. It was an exact duplicate of the original project in every way (except for the new chapter locations), but I simply couldn't figure out how to "update" the original project after I made the changes, and I thought that making a new project would be the easiest thing.
So it is probably the chapter changes that fixed it, but perhaps there was some wierd problem with the first project. The other thing I was wondering about was that this project was less than 2 hours long, but not by much. When I looked at the "Status" section, I had used 3.8 of the available 4.0GB for video.
But the bottom-line is that I am very happy that the project is complete, and I continue to be amazed at the high quality movies and DVD's I am able to create with the iLIFE programs.
Now that this crisis is over, what is your opinion of iLIFE '05? Should I take the plunge and load it up, or keep working with programs that I am happy with? I must admit that I would love to have access to the new "THEMES" in iDVD, but as you can plainly see, I am simply not computer saavy enough to handle any of the new problems that I have read so much about in the iMovieHD, and iDVD5 discussion groups.
Thanks again,
Lincoln