After putting two events next to each other, I tried to overlap one with the other to generate a crossfade. The automatic crossfade button was on. After hitting the expanded track button, I saw that one of the tracks had black diagonal lines going from left to right at approx. a 45 degree angle on them. Only the portion of the event which overlapped the other event had this on it. Even though these two events were overlapped, Vegas would not generate a crossfade and the net result was a "hard" cut when the timeline was played in the preview window. To make matters worse, after finagling with it for a few minutes to "force" a crossfade, Vegas crashed on me and gave an error message with a list of gobblety-gook codes, which only a computer programmer could understand. Two questions- 1) what do the "hatched" black diagonal lines mean on the event? I don't recall seeing that before, 2) why would Vegas crash on me like it did? Does anyone have any plausible explanations? Thanks!

For whatever it's worth, my computer is 2.8G, 1G RAM, two hard drives - one 5400rpm and one 7200rpm. I don't think it's my computer.