There are so many horror stories here's two:
The WMM video that made me get new software AND upgrade my entire PC in order to finish the damn video (actually the 2nd last video I ever made with that fucking program).
I was editing it for almost 12 months, generally I'm a fast editor but after getting 1/4 of the way into the video there were so many cuts/transitions/"effects" (at least what WMM calls effects) that I could litterally only make a single change to the timeline before saving and shutting down the PC completely and then restarting otherwise it would freeze and crash often corrupting the project file in the process, so I had about 50 versions of the project file near the end of it all.
1 change is defined as "drag 1 clip onto the time line" or "shorten(crop) the clip once" or "add a fade out effect". I wasn't edtiing with lossy files either
What would have taken me under 4 hours to do in premiere took 12 months of working every single night in WMM.
For a more recent story:
I was having big problems with AMVapp 3.0 and I had to do and IC match so I made VFAPI's. The lag was so bad that for the first half of the vid I only saw single frames of a clip as it skipped along the timeline, in the second half I couldn't see what was playing at all. So I had to turn off the video layers and set markers along the audio and just add transitions without knowing what was there (I had an idea from when i made the clip but that was all). Editing without playback is SCREWED!!!
I was ready to punch my PC by the end of it, premiere crashed 6 times during playback and took 40-50 minutes to export 1 minute of video :\
My sister didn't believe how bad it really was until she did a practice IC match herself using VFAPI's and I got a call half way through where she was screaming at me on the phone in frustration.
It made the lagggy playback from WMM look fast/good in comparrison.
Anyway lesson learnt I'm sticking to lossless/uncompressed avi's from now on, vfapi's can go die cold and alone in a ditch somewhere.