Motion crashing

I've been having difficulty with Motion crashing a lot lately...it launches OK and then when I try to open a project (just press apple-o) iI briefly get the beachball, then it quits. It actually gave me a kernel panick just now. Is there any steps like trashing prefs or anything that might clear this up, I need to render a couple of projects.

This leads me to my next question. I am trying to export a 30 second promo and it will not output the whole thing, always dies half way or so. Any ideas?

The project in question is quite simple, couple of particle systems and some animated text with some 'slow-mo' video (changed footage item to 10 fps frame rate).

Damon
2.5 gig G5, 1.5 gig RAM, ATI Radeon 9600, Cinewave RT Pro, Atto UL3d & 8 Maxtor Ultra 3 73 gig SCSI drives.