Is there any hope of using iDVD 7 to burn DVDs (Leopard 10.6.6, Mac Mini)?

Question

I've tried many of the suggestions in these discussions, short of reinstalling iDVD or wiping the hard drive and reinstalling OSX 10.6.6, and doing that seems excessive simply to use included Apple software. I have more than 260GB available on my hard drive, no external drives open (there are some connected both by FW and USB, but they are not even turned on, just connected to ports).
iDVD 7.1.1 won't even get past the menu before it fails and gives an error that the 'burn cannot be completed'. There are no 'extras' in the menu, simply ONE QT/iMovie/iDVD compliant 15-second video; no drop zones, no fancy anything, default text for the video 'button', no hyphens or special characters, simply one video from my camera and the application can't get past the menu.
Should I just go back to burning dvds from my powerbook G4 (tibook) through s-video to a dvd/vhs recorder?

Answer 1

Hi, and thanks for the quick response. Yes, I have deleted the iDVD preferences about a dozen times. I started out my first project with a positive attitude and set up to burn 4 videos (all non-copyrighted, from my own cameras and library), and decided to fill in some time with slide shows from pictures on the hard drive (not in iPhoto, but they showed up in the iDVD media area and tested fine following the iDVD 'how to' pdf.)
I had added audio (to the slides), but it was from an external 40-gb firewire drive, and one of the slide shows was from pics stored there.
I removed those externally-hosted files first, after trying several times to delete the plist file with no better results. Then I removed that hard drive from the picture and turned it off, so no external source files are in play.
I removed slide shows entirely from the media list after just removing them from the project and menu seemed to have no affect, partly since the error message mentions the 'menu/slideshows' in it's (boilerplate?) dialog box.
Tried 'burning a disc image' after each modification (reduction of number and length of files) to the project, based on recommendations here.
With each successive error (none of which got past the menu building phase) I removed another video file; deleted the menus entirely and tried 'new' menus, until I decided to remove all videos from the project and try just that one short 15-second video shot last week for posting on a web forum (it was not one of the original videos I hoped to use).
I shut off all 'drop zones' from the menus. I used the default fonts and text buttons that appear when you drag a file from the media list into the menu window.
I even tried rebooting the computer to clear any latent memory that might be causing a problem (as a 'shot in the dark'). After every change, I quit the project and iDVD and deleted the plist, then restarted iDVD and tried again. All to no avail.
I'm on a budget, that's why I downgraded from my old iMac G5 when it died and switched to the Mac Mini aluminum 4,1, and I'm not looking to upgrade my now useless Toast 5xx to a compatible Toast 10 (even if that might work).
To recap:
I started out full-bore with video and photos and music (latter two for slide shows);
After confirming everything worked together and there were no errors showing in the map view, and running through the slides and video files several times to make sure they 'worked', I tried to burn the disc (no disc image at this point, just a confident full-blown burn). Got the error in the menu phase.
Started reading the discussions forum (this place) for a couple hours looking at what problems others were having, and trying the suggestions posed therein. No luck.
Then decided to try deleting preference plist and creating a 'disc image' on the desktop of the entire original project. No luck.
Then multiple incremental changes to the original project until I was left with the single movie file to see if any of my original media files might be the problem. (I even made sure there were no special characters in the titles, menu buttons, etc of any of those files, as someone mentioned the menus don't like any 'special characters'.)
So, here we are. I am wondering if maybe the Mini is just not powerful enough to handle burning dvds? (It seems like it isn't platform based, since iDVD doesn't even get through the menu phase). This Mac Mini is about 1 month old.