Hey, good work mtanner 47. Thanks very much for posting that.
To test, I opened iDVD from an external disc where I had copied it there as a backup. To my surprise, the themes now seemed to be working properly (they weren't on my computer's drive) as you said, including the animated ones. I chose the Reflection White theme and populated the drop zones with photos and dragged in a movie. I then added chapter markers. Everything worked fine. I saved the project to my desktop and then saved it as a disc image. No problem with the encoding and the disc image played fine.
The only glitch that I found was when I went back to the desktop and opened the iDVD project that I had saved, the menu showed only a blank gray screen. No photos, titles, or movie button. I then clicked on the DVD Map button below the screen and clicked on the Movie icon within it. The main screen came up still showing a gray background but this time the title and the play movie buttons were displayed. No photos or animation, however. When I clicked on the movie button the movie did play fine. But when I exited the movie the main menu screen still showed blank gray, with only title and and movie buttons, and no photos or animation.
I didn't try any other themes, and I have to do more testing on this. The glitch about the blank gray screen on the saved iDVD project might be confined to the Reflection White theme. The iDVD project still was playable -- just showed a blank menu screen. I suppose that once you have a successful disc image the only need that you would have for the iDVD project itself is if you wanted to do more editing on the project. I wonder if I had archived it before saving whether that would have made any difference.
Thanks again for your post.
-- Rich