Both the dvds worked fine in PC, the menu stayed there and allowed me to mouse click the episodes - in the DVD player, the menu disappeared before I could nav any of the episodes with remote.

I used anydvd's ripper - set one disc had 'cyclic redundency errors' when trying to copy, but set 2 disc copied ok; I burned a copy from the copied files on PC and the copy had the same problem as the genuine discs in the dvd player.

I'll look into what you suggested with VTS_02_0.VOB