System freezes while recoding video.

Ok, so my best friend calls me on the phone and asks me to go help him, because the "computer hangs while recording dvds".

So I go and check it over, did a general system clean-up and checked on a lot of things. But it turns out the freezing (that requires a hard boot) occurs at some point during the video compression/recoding. He was using DVD Shrink, so I thought "ok, maybe dvd shrink became corrupted or something, before reinstalling it let's try with another program."

So I tried the same job with Nero Recode and it happened again, then I tried with CloneDVD and it happened again.

So.... it's a puzzler, because the system is stable, registry seems healthy, no virus, spyware or malware that I'm aware of. And it started happening all of a sudden.
It's Windows XP Pro SP2, and the dvd-burner works fine because he was able to record some data and video dvds that rquired no video processing beforehand.
It doesn't happen with just one dvd.

What could be the cause of this?
I really don't want to tell him that I have to reinstall Windoze.

Any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks in advanced.
/Mav

 

Usually a freeze is a sign of a hardware problem. It could be that something is wrong with the DVD burner. It could also be that the CPU could have a problem since it is used teadously during video encoding.