I must still admit WMV8 quality was superb. But, I faced this problem twice in MPEG4 Direct Maker: after I finish converting a whole DVD and checkin the content, the length of the movie is incorrect. And also if you move the seek (slide) bar and play, no video is displayed. I doubt if it is a problem with the WMV8 codec.
Athlon XP +1700 is still testing on converting a DVD in DivX 5 Pro codec. I will let you know the results after that
Yet, what I recommend is use:
Video Codec - DivX 5.02 Pro
Audio Codec - 128kbps MP3