What Toolsets do you recommend for AV recording and editing?

I'm in need of help and so have posted the following on a bunch of my LinkedIn group.

I'm hopeful that this crowdsourcing exercise will be save me hours of experimentation.

I'll let you know how it goes dear reader(s)

Of course if you have any ideas/suggestions I'd love to hear them as well.

The Post

First off I have to say that much as I like Articulate, I am not using it. I work for a company that sells ToolBook, a tool that can be used as an e-learning development tool (not Rapid eLearning but eLearning nonetheless) so I use that.

I need to create short 1-2 minute video demonstrations of the software.
These need to have an audio voice over.

At present what I've been doing is:

Using Snagit to record the screen capture video. (Sometimes also making use of Zoomit to zoom into a particular part of the screen). Snagit saves these videos as .AVI files
I use Audacity to record my narration (Thanks Tom Kuhlman for recommending this years ago!)
I then use a product called Avidemux to replace the sound track on the AVI with the MP3 narration.
I then use Format Factory to convert the AVI to MP4 (h.264) which is the recommended format for ToolBook
Yes this is a long and convoluted approach.

And also sadly I've seen some issues with the MP4 file that gets created. Sometimes the video portion repeats.

So can anyone recommend a replacement for this set of tools that is.

1) Easy (or at least easier than this lot) to use
2) Reliable
3) Low cost (or ideally free)

Thanks so much
Alan

Alan Montague, CPLP