How to add a SCREENSHOT to your post.

For the images. Once you set them up in Smartmovie in the order you want them to appear, click on the Edit tab. You will see all your images on an A/V track in the exact order. I am assuming that you want each image to appear onscreen for 5 minutes in length. 40 images equal 200 minutes or about 3.5 hours, yes? Make sure you are in Insert Edit ...

In Smartmovie at the bottom, there are 3 buttons. Select Edit and it will place your movie on the timeline. I am unclear on how long in time you want each image and what is your source for music.

You can, as you have stated, add photos and images (not powerpoint slides) to the timeline. When a still image is added to the timeline, you can stretch it for 5 minutes. If the music is 5 minutes long (or longer) you can add that under the single image.to match it's length. Which version of PS are you using? There are 3, HD, Plus and ...

what if you add a cross dissolve at that point to the audio?

I've just built a new computer and a fresh install of Win10. I will slowly migrate my software over to the new NVME drive, but foresee no problem with PS22.

First, bitrate export. If the video is recorded at 28MBit/s, use that. Where the audio is dropping out, which track is it in the screenshot?

Does the sample project (?>Load Sample movie) have sound? Does anything have sound? Does the VU meter on the lower left show audio is being played? Have you checked the little speaker icon on the Windows Taskbar. Right mouse click and select Volume Mixer and make sure the volume for PS23 is all the way up. Also, in the Preview window in PS, ...

If you zoom into the timeline to single frame, are there any gaps? As for 100MBit/s export, unless your original video was recorded at that bitrate, exporting at a higher bitrate than what the original video is does nothing but take up a lot more hard drive space. 

No crashes with MCE, and none that I have read here in the forum.