wmv encoder problems

Here's the bottom line: I'm trying to get the best video encoding to fit approx. 45 minutes of HDV onto a standard DVD for disribution for PC's. I use Vegas Video version 7 and have found that rendering to WMV using the 3 MBPS setting looks pretty good but for some reason Vegas crashes halfway through the render. I have rendered the original video into a large .avi file and imported into Windows Media encoder, but it doesn't work either. Does anybody have a solution or had success in this area ?