I have several dual external disks with both USB2 and fire wire and never encountered a problem with fire wire connections. I did notice that fire wire is around 50% faster than USB on the same disk and the CPU load with USB is around 6 times higher than with fire wire.
From curiosity, why do you recommend USB instead of fire wire, when everybody knows that USB is around 50% slower than fire wire and carries a much higher CPU burden as well?
Why don’t you just baffle them by saying you are using Autodesk Smoke 2007 Edition 2 on Linux, that will leave them gasping for breath if they know anything about editing and leave them speechless if they don’t.
That does not make sense if you mention the limitation of 2 GB RAM in notebooks. Why spend half of your RAM on the Vista OS, when XP uses so much less?
First update to 3.1. Then create a new project and import the existing, troublesome project. Both steps may help. Also check whether your system may become overwhelmed by the size of the project. What is your disk setup and is it DV or HDV you are editing?