Free movie editor that doesn't suck?

Anyone know of a good video import/editor of some kind that's free or realistically cheap and doesn't completely suck? MS Movie Maker keeps making screwed-up vids that don't play all the way through, and MGI VideoWave is an impossibly buggy lump of poo that keeps locking up on me. I wanna get these exhaust vids off of 8mm and into digital for posting on here, but this is a friggin' struggle...

How can you NOT use it right? It's all pretty linear - click capture, pick your quality level, click "start," click "stop," drag it to the timeframe thing at the bottom, and click "finish." Problem is, it clips out portions of my video for some weird reason totally at random, especially if I'm combining several clips together - it'll play the first clip, part of the second, then a black screen with no sound, then the next clip plays fine, then more blackness/no sound, etc.

And, yeah, it's the latest and "greatest" version. All my drivers/codecs are up to date. It's just buggy garbage on my machine, for whatever reason. Probably a conspiracy.