Problems with video editing

Was trying to help a school get some footage from a camcorder onto a Windows PC in a file format that MS Moviemaker can understand. This was not as easy as I first anticipated due the film being supplied to me on a small DVD-R. One of those ones that are about 2.5 inches across that I havn't seen used in anger for about 3 years.

Problem number 1: how to read the DVD. My laptop wont take those small disks. Found an old USB DVD writer from the dim and distant (6 years ago - before they were commonly put in desktops and laptops). Success. Footage on hard disk.

Problem number 2: ripping the DVD. Now, I am not into this really so I fell back on VLC an excellent piece of software that can norammly reencode stuff into the format I would like. Would it have it? Nope. It would read the difficult VOB files from the DVD ok and convert them into what it said were mpeg2 or wmv files - Moviemaker was resolute in its refusal to play them however. After about 2 hours of headscratching and web research I came accross Quick Media Converter for Windows. Drag and drop - all kinds of conversion. Easy peasy. Thought I had it cracked.

Problem 3: getting a headache now. Video footage not in sync all the way through with audio. Fooled me for a while until a teacher complained because it starts out ok but then goes off. Back to the web for research and found that this commonly happens using a particular encoder of video. No solution.

The Upshot: I've spent too long on this already really and am out of ideas. Have to apologise/wildly justify myself to the teacher concerned. Suggest throwing money at the problem etc etc. Still got a headache.

Any ideas?