The slide show you're seeing is not a file, but a live performance by your video card, which wouldn't work the same way on another machine. Quicktime is the only thing that can make it happen roughly the same way elsewhere. You can show movies fullscreen with a Pro license, but they'll be enlarged from 720x480. You're right - it'd be great if Apple could export the paramteres of a slide show along with the album it needs.

However, imagine that iApps made a new copy of any picture you feel like using for more than one task. Ditto music. You'd run out of hard drive space in short time. It's the difference between keeping copies of files and keeping aliases. iPhoto will duplicate what it sees on your other photo folders if asked to, so see (1) below as well.

The advanced tasks you're trying to do for slide shows (many minutes of multiple songs on a slide show, and much more exportable) are better tackled by iMovie.

However there are some workable fixes to some of the frustrations you are experiencing.

(1) Put your photos on a CD for archival purposes, then let iPhoto handle them, delete any other folders of them you may have had on the hard drive of the same originals for other reasons. I started doing this back in iPhoto4, and it preserves sanity. You know you have a CD backup of originals, and you know the only other place they are is in iPhoto. Also, do camera imports right into iPhoto, then burn these rolls to CD. If you can, don't purge the camera until you've seen the CD reaed properly in some drive after burning. Sounds light a risk, but I've run like this for over year, with thousands of pics, I know I have originals and can manage them in iPhoto, I have it set to edit in Photoshop, and it all works great.

(2) Also - if iPhoto is crashing more often than almost never, you may want to audit what else you have on the machine - 3rd party stuff etc. I run a stable of several generations of Macs running Panther and iLife 05 - and I'm hard pressed to remember the last time iPhoto so much as misbehaved. Frequent crashes need looking into, and every crash gives you the opportunity to report it to Apple - use it, they do.

(3) Slide shows - Try to make an album of the slides you want in a show, and arrange them there first. Yes, you'll likely still have to tweak in the slide show mode later, but much less than if you start with an unorganized set of slides in a slideshow. Again, once a slide show gets complicated, you're often better off in iMovie - there is an obvious overlap in their abilities, so it's a judgement call in which to start with, but it get easy to tell when it's time to switch to one or the other.

Your list of demands sounds mission-critical - like you are doing professional level stuff, which might be better served by Motion, FinalCut and the like.

A lot of what you wish for would be great improvments. Likely Apple doesn't read here much. You can send all this feedback to Apple via the "Provide iPhoto Feedback" menu item in any iApp. You might want to tone down the use of the word "must" on your list of demands - good applications are permissive and forgiving for the widest range of users, not tied by decree to anyone's individual needs.

Best of luck.