Well, I made a perfect edit, and I do mean perfect. Just for the hell of it I clicked on one of the links on the top of this page and downloaded a free trial of a program called "VideoReDo". It claimed to be able to cut out segments on any frame of MPEG-2/VOB files and save without re-encoding; in the same manner that Vdub can do with AVI's. So I joined all of the VOB's together and cut out the 4 seconds of black screen and saved as an MPG which only took a few minutes as it was just a direct stream copy. The result of the MPG was perfect.

I ran it through DVD Lab to turn it back into a DVD and readd all the chapters where they are supposed to be. I let DVD Lab demux the VOB and then when adding them to the movie title; DVD Lab didn't like the raw LPCM audio stream. It said that it had no header and wanted to convert it to a WAV. I allowed it to do that and made the DVD. It was great except for one thing. The audio got slightly out of sync during the scene where Han first sees Lando at the cloud city.

WTF? Do you think the conversion to WAV had anything to do with that or is DVD Lab simply a piss-poor muxer? Like I said, the MPG file that was saved from "VideoReDo" after I cropped out the 4 seconds of black screen is perfect and is a bit for bit copy minus the black screen. It matches up exactly with how that scene appears on the 2004 DVD; i.e. the close shot of C3PO and then the next frame with Leia welding; no black frames and no loss of frames that are supposed to be there; and perfect audio sync throughout.

Any other DVD authoring software I should try (one that can turn DVD compliant video and audio into a DVD [VOB's + IFO's] without re-encoding like DVD Lab can)?