What is wrong with iDVD?

i had a similar problem last night, except i got hung up in stage 2 for about 4 tries. Try to save the project in iMovie and then restart to dump the RAM. Then 'reshare' the project through iMovie to iDvd and things worked fine for me... hope this helps...

 

Do you have a superdrive you've added yourself? If IIRC there was some issue that meant you had to turn off the 'allow drives to sleep' checkbox in the Energy Saving preferences of System Preferences.

 

By any chance do you have a G5? I've had nothing but trouble using iDVD 4 with a PowerMac G5 at work. It does exactly as you describe - basically hang at stage 4. Moving the same project to any G4 computer, selecting Advanced -> Delete Encoded Assets, and then burning has always worked for me. I've tried three different G4 computers and they all burned flawlessly. No luck with the G5.

Take a look at http://www.kentidwell.com/idvd4/ and see if it helps. It has a section specific to iDVD 4 on the G5.