Okay, I gave up on vegas as my rendering tool for mpeg2 and downloaded TMPGEnc. It works great... but it renders the video and audio seperate... how do I merge the .wav and .m2v file that it created into one file for burning?

I don't know how you do this, but TMPGEnc creates one mpeg
file here, not a seperate .wav file. Make sure you choose
System (Video+Audio) for the stream type. If that still does not
work tell us what settings you go through and what you do.