Recommend me a good free video editing program

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a set of small video clips (mostly AVI) that I wish to cut sections from and append said sections together. I am looking for a free video editor for Windows XP that will allow me to do this one simple task. Can someone recommend one?

I have tried various ones off the web, and they fall into one of 2 categories:

  1. Has no easily apparent or documented way to cut the clips
  2. Allows cutting clips, but simply crashes at some point during usage.

(Editorial rant mode) I’m pretty experienced with software and computers in general, and I’ve had lots of good luck with shareware and freeware. But media burning and video editing appear to be a whole new world of crap. I have never experienced so much outright application crashing or unimplemented simple features as when trying to find one of these. Every time I find one that does what I want, it implodes with some hideous low-level error, or just hangs and never comes back.

2

MS Windows Movie Maker. Or VirtualDub. You might also want the MPEG2 plugin if you use Vdub.

3

I’ll try Vdub, thanks. I tried Windows Movie Maker and found that it fell into the crashy category.