Suggestions for Video editing software

[pgd]

I'd appreciate help on selecting video editing software. My main interests are to capture video off our Satellite Dish signal and make dvds (primarily old movies from the 30's, 40's and 50's that aren't available on DVD) and to take video from our camcorder and burn it onto DVDS. In both cases I want to make decent menus and be able to edit the video (remove commercials etc).
On my old computer, which recently died, I'd been using an ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 card and editing with Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus. This was a challenge, as the Pinnacle software is quite quirky and finicky, especially about audio sync and image breakup problems. Additionally their tech support is laughable. They do have a decent users forum although it seems all too often to be used to register complaints about Pinnacle rather than solutions. I did, however, get to the point, (right before my system died), where it worked pretty well for what I wanted to do.
I recently bought a Windows XP Media Center edition PC, with an Athlon 64 x2 4200+ dual core proc, With 1G memory. It came with a Conexant Falcon II NTSC Video Capture Card in addition to an ATI Radeon x300se PCI Express card. The system works fine, except the Media Center program doesn't support AVI video capture and seems to be quite limited as to what I want to do.
I installed my Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus software and it refuses to accept audio and video in the capture window. I looked around on their forums and found that, apparently, Pinnacle products can't use some video capture cards (including Hauppauge).
So now I'm thinking maybe I should move up to a better DVD authoring program and possibly buy a better capture card for it. What do you recommend for the interests I've mentioned above?
This is something I've really started to get into the last couple of years, and would be willing to spend a fair amount on in order to do it right (and hopefully more efficiently). The time I've wasted trying to get Pinnacle Studio to work propery has been very annoying and somewhat costly. I'm self employed and the hours spent on that program are hours I've not been able to spend on work or with my family.
I'm looking at possibly trying Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. Does this program do what I want? Is it overkill? Is it fairly easy to learn? If it would work with the card already in my system, that's about a $100 savings right there that could go toward the software cost.

I'd appreciate any help.
PG