found this thread on creativecow
http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1151488
I seem to be having the same issue....I'm on FCP 7, but X does it as well. And my friend says it happens on his machine? Is this just a big glitch that most people have but which has never caused major problems for people?
I'm having audio sync issues as well, but it turned out this issue of changing durations was NOT the issue, as the clips synced up again once importing in the timeline.
To test it, I took a 3 hour clip from a previous project and created a wav audio file from it. I then imported the wav file into FCP7 and it read as being about 11 seconds shorter than the video clip it was created from. But THEN in the timeline they synced back up.
Took me a long time to realize this was NOT the culprit to the syncing issues on my current project