Well, in my case, editing strictly in the timeline does give Premiere a whole more to chew on as far a system performance go.
In fact, there are many things that I used to do in the timeline such as resizing and cutting clips that would cause Premiere to freeze on rendered footage.
A corrupted footage though can be the cause of many things. Moving projects between drives, or USB sticks, even a bad hardrive wouldn’t surprise me. Also, if you are saving manually that often, I would look into changing the name once in a while.
Vince