Crashes/errors/instability

I’m pretty new to Flash. I have slowly built up an .fla file to its current size of 44MB. It is in AS3 (CS4) and has numerous jpegs imported into it with animated masks over each.

I am now experiencing multiple issues that have made it impossible to work on it.

  1. A week ago I started occasionally getting “Flash has has unexpectedly quit” error messages, whereupon Flash would crash. This was before I started adding many of the jpegs and the file size was still something like 5MB. Now I receive these messages almost constantly - If I try to open a second file within Flash or when I just work in my main file for a few minutes.

  2. A few days I ago I started getting a few random messages saying “error initializing java runtime environment you may need to reinstall flash”. This was fixed by simply restarting Flash, but still troublesome.

  3. Rarely I would finish working on something and try to test the movie. It would go through the loading bar, but then nothing would happen. The only way to fix this was to go back to a previous file version and rebuild from there. My current file save has this problem.

Now I am stuck because I have to go back quite a ways to find a file that will successfully test. On top of that if I try to import one of my new movieClips into the older file version, Flash of course crashes.

Is the file too big? It doesn’t feel like I’m doing that much. I’ve definately seen flash sites that have way more going on than mine. Could it be all the imported jpegs? Could I be importing them in a bad way? How can I avoid/fix these issues?