What steps can help burning an iMovie '09 project to DVD when the program crashes?

I have been working on an iMovie multimedia (picture, music, titles, etc.) project for six months using iMovie '09. Six months later it is not allowing me to further add anything to the project, and iMovie keeps crashing on me. I decided to stop, and burn it to iDVD. I have now tried at least 3 times to export project to iDVD to burn this disk, and after two hours of supposed copying; I come back to my computer to find out iMovie "Quit Unexpectedly"! The project is approximately 200MB. I just deleted the iDVD preferences playlist, and did verfy and repair disk permissions in Disk Utility. Any ideas on what to do next?