One suggestion is to play music as you render.... here's the full text of an interesting email.

The idea of playing music to help it finish is a new one... cooling with ice and a fan isn't. I know of two cases where the saving process would get pretty far along and then stop.... the first was resolved by putting the laptop in front of a window air conditioner... the second was a desktop unit - a ceiling fan was turned on to high and a desktop fan was placed on the floor taking the air from the ceiling fan and passing it to the computer.... in both cases the rendering process issue was resolved.

January 18, 2004 email

Hi Papa John!

My name is William and I am from South Africa.

I have also recently experienced the problem on Windows Movie Maker 2, where it freezes when you want to save, and then your TIME LEFT just goes up and up, and won't stop.

I have a few words that will cure that problem!

First of all, when I had Windows XP Home Edition, it worked fine! But when I Installed XP professional Edition, it didn't work! So there's one point! (But i'm not exactly sure about that one!)

Secondly, if you have Professional XP, you have to play music in Windows media player 9, in order for the saving prosess to make progress! It might sound funny, but it actually works! Windows Movie Maker 2 depends on Windows Media Player 9 in order to save!

So, you have to have enough music to last your saving time. THE MUSIC HAS TO PLAY! And if you don't want your video to have a lot of cracking sound when the scene SOMETIMES changes, you have to turn off all of your Windows Media Player 9 effects - SRS WOW effects, equalizer, crossfading, EVERYTHING. The Visualization screen should be minimized, and you can even play it in the MEDIA GUIDE, so that no Visualization is showing. So mainly, all that the Windows Media Player 9 has to do is PLAY MUSIC (Not Video), not the effects or anything, JUST MUSIC, so that there isn't too much going on elsewhere while you are saving!

Play the music BEFORE you want to save, then tell the programme to save. Keep the music going untill your movie is completed saving! We also opened up the ComputerBox and put ice on the Fan box, and we put a fan next to the Prosessor fan, but we saved future stuff as well, without needing the fan and ice..... But i read that you could try to cool down you system while saving, so that it doesn't get too warm, so that's why we tried it in the first place! So if the saving still won't work while using WMP9, you can then try to save again, but with the ice, and the fan!

That solves the problem!

Spread The word, I think that this will help everyone!

Thank You for listening

William