And the answer is (apparently / possibly) a corrupted cache. I looked into
the burning cache location and found only a partial listing of the files I
had designated for the burn. I deleted them manually, rebooted the system,
and burning returned to normal behavior. I'm not sure, but it appears that
the cache was not cleared after a previous burn was performed. I think I'll
just set the wizard to stay up so that I can manually click on the Finish
button after finishing a burn to see if that will keep this from happening
again.

"jimmuh" wrote:

> Frankly, I've thought the inbuilt DVD/CD burning features of Windows XP and
> Vista have always been pretty flaky. The whole thing just doesn't look to me
> as though it was designed by someone who actually wanted it to work, what
> with the various balloon messages about seeing files that are ready to be
> burned and the series of little dialog boxes. But the past couple of days the
> feature doesn't even work badly any more. I stick a blank DVD-R disc in the
> drive, the dialog pops up to ask me whether I want to use WMP or Windows to
> burn files to the disc. I choose to use Windows, I get to designate the files
> I want burned, and the disc image creation progress bar comes up. But that
> process, after going on for several minutes, just wanders off into la-la land
> and quits. The Explorer Window and the dialog box just go away. No error
> messages, no nothing.
>
> Has anyone else seen this on Vista Business RTM?
>
> The only disc burning related installation I have done on this computer is
> to install IsoRecorder, which works just fine, BTW.