Non-stop crashes in iMovie ’09 Version 8.0.6 (821)

After many years of reliable service, my version of iMovie 09 has decided to begin crashing after around 60 seconds of use. Projects now take five times as long to make, because whenever I add a single clip the program crashes again.

I am happy to upgrade to the latest version of iMovie, but does anyone know how I can tell if these issues will persist with the new version too? I'm uncertain as to whether or not it's some kind of hardware issue. I'm on a 3.06 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, with 4 GB of memory.

Many thanks in advance.