Timeline - Cannot Move Tracks and Display Problem

Question

I've created about a ten-minute timeline that I'd really prefer not to toss out because a lot of work went into creating parts of it and getting the timing right with the music, etc. When I first open the project in Premiere Elements, everything seems okay - my timeline plays with all transitions and I can scroll around in the timeline. However, I appear to have done something where whenever I click and drag to try to move a track, the timeline goes insane. I get a circle with a line through it for a cursor and a blank tooltip window, whether I try to drag the track horizontally or vertically. After that, while the timeline will still play, the timeline itself gets all wonky in its display, almost as if the video isn't refreshing on it. (It's kind of like the timeline has crashed.) I attached a screenshot of what it looks like. Whenever I move my cursor to the edge of the timeline, the timeline scrolls in that direction.
I'm running Premiere Elements 7 Educational Version on  a Core 2 Duo laptop with 3GB RAM, an Intel 965 graphics chip (latest Intel drivers are installed), and Vista Business 32-bit. The clips are from a standard DV cam (not HD), and there are some PNG format stills and MP3 sounds mixed in there as well. There are three active A/V tracks. I think that's all the relevant information, but ask me if you need more.
Can anyone tell me what I've done and/or how to fix this?

Answer 1

Good morning every one!
The bad news: As expected the problem does still occur. The good news: I was able to track it down to one clip in the timeline.
To save others time, I will described what I have evaluated quite detailed in the following paragraphs...
As it seemed to me that deactivating the Windows indexing service made the usage of PrE more stable I thought that maybe file locks would cause the trouble. So I verified this by opening the project in PrE, writing and executing a small Java application that puts an exclusive file lock on one of the files from the project and tried to move the according clip in the timeline. It worked without any problems and the known symptoms did not occur. So we can put aside the file locks.
Afterwards I tried to reproduce the problem by playing around with the scene that caused problems last week. I tried by moving around the video clips and the problem did not occur. Then I remembered my statement I have made earlier, that the problems seemed to occur as I started to work with titles and music clips -- and bingo: I have three music clips in my "soundtrack" track and one of them seems to cause the whole trouble. After I have clicked on this specific music clip, the problem occurs and it is no longer possible to move anything in the timeline and the strange behaviour regarding the automatic scrolling when the cursor is at the left/right etch is activated.
It was easily reproducable: Restart PrE, open my project, move a video clip to verify that moving clips works, click on the specific music clip and the problem occurs. I have tried this several times and each time the problem occured. When I clicked on one of my other two music clips everything was fine -- same for the video clips I tried. So in my case it seems to be this single clip.
OK, what's specific regarding this clip: All my music files are placed on a share on my Windows home server (in contrast to the video footage which is located on the local HD). So I moved the "dangerous" music file to the local HD, changed the path to the file with a text editor directly in the PrE project file (which is a simple XML file) and started up PrE again. I verified that PrE takes the file from the local HD (server was down), but the problem did still occur. So it is not a network issue.
The next specific thing is, that this music file is the only file in my project which is a .wma-file -- the others are .mp3-files. So I did three things:
At first I downloaded the project file provided by SQFreak2 in this thread and checked whether he is also using .wma-files. The result: He does not use them.
As the second thing I again changed my project file in the text editor: I changed the path of the music clip to some other .mp3-file. Afterwards I opened up PrE with that project file, used the playback to verify that the other music file is referenced by the clip instead of the original wma-file and then tried to move the clip -- again the symptoms occured.
As the last step I created a new project, added the "problematic" wma-file, placed it on the "soundtrack" track and afterwards tried to move it. The result: No problems at all.
So it neither seems to be a generic problem with wma-files nor does it seem to be a file-specific problem at all.
Lets summarize the things from above: File locks do not cause any trouble. In my project a single audio clip seems to cause the problem. The problem seems to be caused by the clip and not the file referenced by the clip (no matter whether local or server based, wma or mp3, the problem occurs in every case).
What I have learned? Well, I am not sure. But in the meanwhile I am quite sure, that it hasn't to do anything with hardware and drivers, but that we are dealing with a bug in PrE that occurs in specific project cirumstances.
This morning I have got some additional ideas I would like to try to track the problem down (e.g. the problematic clip has a transition for a fade out in the end [when I did this I didn't knew, that a fade out could be easily achieved in the clip's properties] -- I will try to remove this one and look what will happen).
P.S.: In one of my earlier posts I stated the assumption that the problem occurs as soon as I move the mouse cursor over the vertical scroll bar of the timeline -- but this is definitely not the case.