I was bitten by the TMPGEnc crash everytime I opened an AVI file as well. The problem is that TMPGEnc doesn't support the Pinnacle AVI format. I would suspect that most people with the strange TMP behavior are people with DV200 or DV500 Pinnacle capture cards.

So here's what you do:
Once you're done capturing in Premiere (which you should have since it comes with these DV200/500 cards), you need to run the AVI through a codec. I like the MPEG-4 codec because it makes the AVI files reasonably small, but there are some other choices. Once you've run it through and created a new AVI file, TMP will happily accept it without crashing.

Good luck.