That said, is there any way in Adobe Premiere 1.5 to adhere to zero crossings in the audio portion of the video clip?
I'm not quite sure what SW you are referring to here - the current version of Premiere is Premiere Pro, and that's actually version 7. Audition, on the other hand
is at version 1.5...
Unless my begin and end points are snapped to zero crossings, I am going to get a great big "POP" when 9:99 and 20:01 join together.
Not necessarily - certainly not as far as Audition is concerned, anyway. If you look in Options>Settings>Data you will find two checkboxes that relate to this. The first says 'Smooth delete and cut boundaries' and sets the default at 2mS, and the second says 'Smooth all edit boundaries by crossfading' and normally defaults to 15mS. For normal edits, the default values are fine, and will eliminate all pops at transitions.
This software has been around a while. One of the reasons that it's so popular as an editor is that all of these little details have been attended to, and are also fine-tunable if you want. Can you imagine how much slower every edit you ever made would be if this hadn't been very thoughoughly and comprehensively taken care of? It works fine - try it!