Ulead VS6 Encoding Questions

I'm using Ulead VS6 to author DVDs, starting with my own DV AVI files. Rather than use the tapes, I input DV AVIs, and use either ULEAD VS2 or TMPGenc to encode to MPEG2. I edit these, add transitions, menus, etc. I get a lot of crashes of VS6. I've clarified the problem. Just cutting a clip from an MPEG2 file using SmartRender, ULEAD will often crash. It doesn't matter whether the source file was encoded with TMPG or Ulead VS6. It does matter what clip -- it crashes if the clip contains a particular point in the larger file. There can be more than one of these points. Having cut an hour into around 16 clips, Ulead would crash attempting to produce 4 of them. I know the spots that are causing the crashes and can't see a problem if I play them with PowerDVD. I like smartrender because it avoids re-encoding, and lets me preserve the quality of the TMPG encoding in my authoring. That is a nice feature, but it is only working 75% of the time for me. So I would be interested if anyone has encountered and solved this problem, or for an alternate strategy for producing clips from MPEG2 files. Is there an inexpensive program that just cuts and saves the clip file? CCE is pretty expensive if one is avoiding logos. A different question is what value ULEAD DVD Workshop offers over VS6, other than dynamic menus, or if anyone recommends an authoring program in the $250 range that makes cutting, transitions, menus, and other editing tasks straightforward.

Workaround 

I seem to have found a workaround. I cut the clips in TMPGenc Plus (I hadn't realized this program included a cut and paste tool). This doesn't involve re-encoding. Then VS6 works fine to assemble, add titles, credits, transitions, menus etc., smartrendering (so again not re-encoding) producing VIDEO_TS, and image file, and burning.