What's a good alternative to Windows Movie Maker?

Is there any good Movie maker, preferably free, that has the pros of WMM—Ease of use and automatically cutting a movie file into clips—without the cons—Freezing and in my case, the audio layer not playing at the same time as the video layer in preview mode.

If nothing like this exists – which I hope is not the case – then if anyone could tell my how to get audio and video to sync during a preview in WMM it would be most appreciatied (They only sync properly if I start the video from the beginning).