I'm running winXP and currently have Nero 5.5 enterprise edition with MPEG codecs and DVDit! LE installed, as well as Adobe Premiere with the Adobe MPEG encoder.

1)Nero has very limited options in menus. As far as I can tell, there are no nested menus, and very limited layout options. Of the two CDs I did burn, one was coasterized, even on a drive with buffer underrun protection. But I'm comfortable with Nero since I've been using it forever for audio CDs.

2)DVDit is has a slick-looking interface and allows more detailed menus but is programmed terribly! You can't move menus and dialog boxes! It crashed a few times, and the interface isn't very intuitive. I'm trying to burn a 600MB video to a 700MB CD but the program is adding 300+MB of overhead, compared to Nero's <1MB.

What programs are the rest of us using? Are they worth paying for? Is there a program that just designs menus that I could import into Nero? I will buy a DVD burner at some point so SVCD and DVD functionality are important.