Problems converting TO wmv - audio skips in playback

[baseband]

I'm using WME9 to convert DVD-compliant videos I previously encoded into a smaller format for portability. The videos have AC3 audio streams.

I've encoded 10 videos in WME so far. The encoder always crapped out on the second pass of its first attempt at encoding the video, then when I clicked "Start Encoding" a second time without making any changes, the video would encode fine. It did this for each and every one of the videos.

The resultant WMV files look absolutely great for such a low bitrate; no qualms there. Unfortunately, the audio cuts out for a half second at various places in all the videos. I know it's not an issue of my computer being too slow do decode, because the audio problems are always in the same places.

I'm using the "CD quality" audio setting in WME. Any suggestions?

[baseband]

Whoops. Sorry. Since I guess my source files are DVD-compliant, Newbie Conversion would be the appropriate forum for this post, according to the sticky. Could some moderator move this for me?