Software Recommendations - WMV-Support / Trim-&-Join Capable / Fast Enc

[Chimera07]

I'm well aware it's poor etiquette to request aid without first having offered it, but I'm hoping I'll be forgiven.
Here's the issue: I have some home-movie clips, mostly of family events (birthdays and the like), that I would like to join into a single reel. Each were delivered to me in WMV format, of varying sizes (the smallest is roughly 79MB whereas the largest is a couple hundred). My first instinct was to edit them with the aid of a software suite I am comfortable with, the Adobe CS4 Master Collection, which includes Premiere Pro CS4. The trouble is, my work with Adobe products is situated around Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop, never Premiere. I am, or was, quite lost.
Still, it took only a few minutes before the intuitive UI allowed me to grasp what I wished to accomplish: to join the clips, add some cross-dissolve transitions, a fade-to-black at the end, while correcting the color on certain clips (which are either washed out or, more often, over-saturated such that people look orange) and trim out the frames I don't care for. This done, I proceeded to export the finished project utilizing the High-Quality preset and exporting back to WMV format again.
Therein lies the problem and the catalyst of my request: pressing "export" led the CS4 Media Encoder to pop-up and inform me that a project which boiled to a collection of clips roughly 600MB in size (and estimated to be 263MB when finished encoding by Premiere) would take me six-hours to encode! Six-hours!
The point is, I don't have that kind of time. After browsing the net I garnered that Premiere generally isn't used for such "trivial" tasks as this. Thus, I ask, are there any alternatives? I am not amiss to purchasing new software to speed up the task, so free program recommendations aren't a necessity. I just want something that works and doesn't demand a quarter of the day to produce a clip that's smaller than what I began with.
Any aid would be greatly appreciated...

[Baldrick]

Converting takes time. And six hours doesn't say anything for us without any information about the total runtime for the video.

But you can always try Windows Movie Maker and see if it's faster.

And if you just are going to join or cut you can use asfbin, no reconversion, but it's not that user friendly and you can't use transitions and such.

[Chimera07]

Converting takes time. And six hours doesn't say anything for us without any information about the total runtime for the video.

My apologies, mate, I thought the file size alone would suffice. Six hours, estimated at 263 MB filesize and with a runtime of roughly twenty-or-so minutes.

But you can always try Windows Movie Maker and see if it's faster.

Thanks, will do.

And if you just are going to join or cut you can use asfbin, no reconversion, but it's not that user friendly and you can't use transitions and such.

Transitions are a nicety, not really necessary to enjoy the memories. Thanks for the recommendation. Am I correct in assuming that, without the reconversion issue, it will be much swifter?