AE keeps locking up on computer!

[J5 squared]

I've got AE 6.5 pro installed on my amd 3200 pc with 2gb of ram installed. Normally my rig runs excellent but I've been having serious issues with AE. I'm fairly new to AE and just starting to get into some of its neat features. Well at the moment i'm working on a project with 4 layers of video and a few photoshop layers, 11 layers in total. When ever i make an adjustment of the keyframes it stutters for literally a few seconds before it catches up to what i've just done. Sometimes it won't catch up at all and it will simply quit responding and i'll have to close it. Does anyone know of some settings i may need to adjust to make it more usable, currently i'm scared to even go into it in fear of loosing any work. I've got the preview scaled to 50% and to 1/4 resolution and its still just as choppy. Any advice?

 

[Steve_Arm]

Check for graphics card compatibility.
I have seen the exact seem happening on a PC with a Matrox graphic card.
Try to disable OpenGL for AE to see if that fixes it.

One more thing, it might be sound related.

 

[J5 squared]

I've got a ati radeon 9800 all in wonder. But i'm running a dual monitor setup and using a second cheap-o "i dont even know the model but it was $20" ati card for the second monitor. Think that could have something to do with it? Also i'm using huge photshop layers so that i can zoom in without pixelation, the layers are like 2160x1440 could that be whats slowing it down? i've had issues before in vegas when working with huge pictures.