Good lightweight freeware video editor?

Just need something to do fast, basic operations. I pulled a bunch of related tutorial videos off Youtube and I'm trying to cut off the useless headers and footers and then combine them into one long clip instead of a series of short ones.

I tried Windows Movie Maker Wave 3, but it's complete crap (obviously). In addition to technical and UI shortcomings, it recompresses the video and severely degrades quality. I didn't see any option to avoid recompression.

I used to have a little freeware app that was perfect for this stuff, but I can't seem to find it anymore and don't even remember the name. A browse of download.com revealed little of value; lots of overpriced trialware.

Nothing is really better than virtualdub. http://www.virtualdub.org/

It's not really the tool for doing effects editing but from what you described it might be the tool you had in the past.