If anyone's interested in yet another ripping tool, I found a great one yesterday called
DVDx which will rip the DVD and encode directly to .avi and supports divx encoding, multiple passes, and Lame MP3 audio encoding as well, which obviously eliminates the need to spend several GB's of HDD space. In the same amount of time it takes to normally do the encoding process anyway, you can rip the DVD, resize it if you want, and divx/mp3 encode the whole thing in one step. All that's left is running it through VirtualDub for rotating and resizing, if you didn't resize with DVDx, and perhaps reducing the audio quality.
ps: If the DVDx site is busy/down (I'm told it's because the program has become rather popular suddenly) try searching for 'DVDx_2_2_setup.exe' on filemirrors.com or some other mirror site.