Hi Kevin,
This has been going on for 5 years? That just might be a record. Not one I'd want to hold, however.
My first thought is that you need to reset the FCP preferences. At least up thru FCS2, whenever FCP starts to act strangely, it's usually due either to a recently installed app or upgrade, or to a FCP preference file gone astray. To reset your FCP prefs, an app that will do the work for you is at
http://digitalrebellion.net/pref_man.htm
Or, you can do the same thing manually. A search for "trash preferences" in this forum will eventually lead you to discussions where all the individual steps are listed.
Another possibility is that one or more versions of apps loaded in your Mac are out of sync with each other. All I know about this is what I've read in this FCP forum. It seems that certain combinations of versions of FCP + OS + Quicktime work best together. If an installed version of any of those is too high or too low, then an upgrade or downgrade of the app will fix the problem. The version of QT is usually the first suspect.
In the info below your post, it indicates you're at 10.4, but not which version of FCP or QT you have installed. Perhaps if you post those, someone here who keeps track of version combos can spot if there's a potential problem with your version mix.
In the past 5 years, have you ever started from scratch with a blank hard drive and installed all your apps from the original disks? Whenever I upgrade to a new OS or FCP version, I just pop in a new HD and spend a day shuffling disks. Time consuming, but I believe it leads to far less time wasted down the road with crashes or troubleshooting.
