The trial version of Ulead Mediastudio 8 crashed 80% through my edit and corrupted the files on my external hard drive which now thinks it's unformatted. I'm sending it off to a friend to try and save the files I had on there, but I hear ulead often crashes and leaves the files and backups of the project you're working on unopenable. Has anyone else encountered this? Is it worth trying again? I'm on Windows 2000 and it doesn't look like much professional software works on anything but XP.

since i started working with hd material (1440x1080i h.264 sources converted from avchd) i get random crashes with mediastudio 8, but it _never_ left any of my files unusable or even corrupted my harddisk. of course anything could happen, but i'd rather guess that your harddisk crashed and that made MS go down, not the other way.

I think it's happened to me only once where the file was so corrupt, it couldn't be opened. Once after a hard crash, I opened a project only to find everything totally screwed up...files swapped, files duplicated, a total mess. I had to get in there and redo just about everything. I've since learned that with these types of complicated programs, saving constantly certainly reduces the risks. Another problem cropped up being once saved, you can't undo.