Two thoughts:

Regarding Sorenson: I have heard from a couple of sources that sorenson 4.2 and 4.3 have had some issues with some processors. I know from personal experience that 4.2 does not work reliably on AMD 64 processors (crashes intermittently), but works fine on Intel processors.

What I have found is that with all versions of Sorenson, it is more likely to crash if you load up a bunch of jobs (i.e., more than 2 or 3) using the "import" function. However, if you put all the files to be encoded in one folder and then use the "watch folder" function, 4.1 works fine on either AMD or Intel, and 4.2 works fine on Intel. I thought 4.3 was supposed to fix those problems, but sounds like it may not have. Don't give up on it; Sorenson has some of the best and fastest codecs in the industry, I'd contact their support and see what they suggest; I know they have rolled some folks back to 4.1 while they were working on the fix, but that was a few months ago.

Regarding Boilsoft: My concern with splitting videos is to make sure that everyone remembers/knows that (as I understand it, at least) you need to have a 2257 notice on any video clip containing sexually explicit material. When we break up our clips, we do it in Premiere so that we can put the clip title (so-and-so jerks off, part 2) and the 2257 notice on the front of the clip. I suppose you could piece the an encoded clip containing 2257 info with the WMVs output by Sorenson, using Windows Movie Maker, but we like to do it with pretty crossfades and such, which would require re-encoding to do that.

So our solution is to slice it up in Premiere, add the 2257 to each subclip, output as AVI, and then encode the AVIs to WMV with Sorenson. This has the added advantage of allowing us to preserve the high-res versions of exactly what's being encoded, so if we later want to go back and produce higher bitrate WMVs, we don't have to mess with recreating the break locations or re-doing the 2257 insertion.