Movie Maker pauses randomly & wont start playing again. Sometimes freezes and stops working, and sometimes freezes entire laptop.

Since I updated Windows Essentials about a week ago, movie maker will not work right. It pauses randomly between clips, but it shows that it's still playing. So I have to exit out of it and start it up again. Then after having to do that a few times, it stops working all together (usually when I try to edit a clip or the music). And sometimes it even freezes my entire laptop, causing me to have to shut it down and reboot, losing all the work I just did. It worked fine before the update, and I can't pinpoint whats exactly wrong. The files that I'm using are all wmv and the music is in wav.