I believe this is to do with a couple of flags in the IFO's being set incorrectly by DVD2SVCD/DVDAuthor for us in PAL land. If you open the two IFO's (in IFOEDIT) you might see the "Menu" settings in both are NTSC and MPEG-1, this does absolutely nothing bad when played on the vast majority of DVD players, since it's only a couple of irrelevant flags, but of course there are exeptions. I have been changing the previously mentioned flags to PAL MPEG-2 since I encountered the same freezing problems on a couple of DVD players (not sony's either :p ).