Well folks, i thank all of you who even stopped to look at my question, but i've found my answer. I did some searching and found that i needed a new xvid codec....it stopped the crashing and i'm able to convert to dvd now, no problem. i had thought that if it played the movie then i didn't need a new codec, apparently you can still play a movie and need to have a new codec, otherwise your computer freaks out.....weird.......