Stan, I am back ! I had a couple of other 'issues' going on. One of which was that I had lost my mercury engine playback function. I have got that resolved including updated GPU drivers. I mention this as it may/may not have affected other options going on. First rule of the lab: only do one experiment at a time and log all variables !
Anyway, after I got that sorted, I took your advice and manually cleared my cache - all 85GB of it. I then went back to Encore, saved the project and hit build check which was okay. So I hit build and 90 minutes later out pops a perfect dvd ! No idea why it was suddenly okay. Could the rediculous cache I was carrying have caused that ? It doesn't seem likely. I have looked but cannot find an internal cache clear in encore. As I said, I did it manually. Anyway, for the future, I think I'll take your advice and transcode individually.
thanks for the help and advice,
Regards,
TL.