windows movie maker common problems?

Been using the windows movie maker that came bundled with my XP pro windows.. a few questions have now come up....

1. when I edit the my digital footage into a 13 minute movie with maybe 26 edits, and a 4 minute music track it takes up to 38 minutes to save ( 35 MB ).., and once it is saved in my projects and I shut down the program and come the next day it takes up to 4 minutes to open the project..

2. After i save the movie, I find it is also available to me in windows media player 10.., BUT there is no effects or music , only the edited footage.. why ?

3. along the top bar next to collections there is a long open window with an inverted chevron that allows me to see all the changes and saves i have done...

trouble is there a lot of them there and I want to clear this bar.. how ???

My PC is P4 / XP Pro SP 2 /512 MB DDR-SDRAM / 2.09 Ghz AMD Athelon XP 2800+ shared memory 64 MB / memory bus speed 2x167MHz.

I burnt the movie to disc and it looks great..

wanted to add the process here..: I did a quick minor edit change to the movie before the burn, then saved the change., then 'saved to disc' took 52 minutes..

49 min to Hard drive ... and less than three minutes to the CDR ..

maybe it is the file extension that is giving me grief.. If I change to .wmv instead of its current .MSWMM ?????

but would it save all my F/X ?? and audio ????

MSWMM is the project file not just the movie. It took that long to save to disk because it had to be processed/converted at the same time. It only took a few minutes to save to CD because by then it was just being burned as a normal windows file without any processing because it had already been done.

I believe you need to extract/convert the movie out of that file first to get it to be just a wmv file although I've never done that specifically. Here's some info, if you need it on movie maker...

http://www.papajohn.org/