I was working on something and was nearly done, and then WMM glitched up, so I had to close it, and the auto-recovery thing didn't even ****ing work, so I now I have to do it all over.
Yeah, all video editors are prone to errors due to being resource heavy. And WMM gets it worse than most. You should be saving a lot in there.
This doesn't happen too often, thankfully, but usually it's not a big deal when I have to start over since usually all I edit are my walkthroughs and let's plays, so all I really do is trim the video and add fade in and out effects at the beginning and end or trim the video, synchronize the narration, and add fade in and out effects at the beginning and end if it's a let's play, but I'm working on something different today: It's a bug demonstration on a small (non-game breaking), but interesting, bug I discovered in Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits a long time ago, so yeah.
I went to VideoPad Editor before I managed to get Sony Vegas for the longest time. It's a lot smoother to use than WMM, and more reliable
It crashed again, but this time I saved it. I disabled the Roxio plugins under Compatibility, so we'll see if that helps. I know those caused problems before.
Vegas autosaves have rescued my projects many times before. You might want to look into moving to a different editor.
That's okay! Editors are expensive, but many have consumer editions which are much cheaper than the pro versions and should suit the purposes he's using them for fine (I assume Let's Plays, etc.), especially if Windows Movie Maker can. @Amaury, if you can afford to spend a little, you might consider consumer-grade editing software (Vegas Movie Studio, etc.). If you buy a version or two behind the latest one, you can get most of the same features for less than the MSRP. How much it'll cost depends on which software, so you'll have to look around, but I think it would be well worth it for you. Some of them run very cheap.
Yeah, I spent about £20 ($34) on Sony Vegas 8.0 Platinum addition and it has everything I need and isn't too difficult to get the hang of.