does anyone know if there is a half decent dvd creator like dvd santa for windows ? to turn avi, mpg files into vob files

What do you exactly need:

In order to create DVD from MPEG2 DVD compartable files you can use dvdauthor - simple and powerful program.

If you want to encode AVI(or whatever movie) to DVD (I assume that your DVD doesn't read DivX or Xvid formats) that you will need following suite:

tovid

http://tovid.sourceforge.net/

I use it for encoding my AVIs to DVD. (I've found it much better then any commercial/shareware windows products for same job)

hey i tried the programs you suggested but when i tried to make a dvd outta a avi file which was 700mb everything was going fine i got it working and setup and left it this morning and went to work and when i returned 8 hours later it was still going and 0% done so i suspended it and resumed it and it went for a bit then it closed itself but mplayer was still eating my cpu in /tmp it created the menu bit and a 288mb mpg file...my doing something wrong here ? it only took me 2 hours or less using dvd santa under xp and i've a 3gig cpu and 1gig ram

Try to ask there:

http://tovid.dk3.com/

The Tovid forum