Burning a disc or writing an ISO [a disc image of an optical disc] is with few exceptions no big deal -- quality & compatibility [playability] depend more on the drive & the blank media you use. A few years back you had to watch what software you used if you wanted a music CD without gaps or a video DVD that played in your set-top player, but most of those worries are gone now -- the only real exception I'm aware of is Imgburn being still often preferred for dual layer video DVDs you author. That means that for most run-of-the-mill disc burning you should most often just use the software you like best, whether because of the design of its GUI, the apps & features that come with it, or both... you can pay a bit over $100 for Roxio, use the free Imgburn, or try BurnAware Home from GOTD, and the end results, the disc you burned, should be the same.
Nero & Roxio are the big names, both for being 1st on the market & for being bloated from bundling all sorts of extra apps -- Nero's finally taking a [baby] step back from this approach, making a good portion of their v. 12 suite an optional download. Ashampoo's also a big name, offering IMHO the most hand holding of any burning app. Imgburn is a free app that can address most everything you can address with your burner -- Imgburn supports a quite lengthy list of settings, pretty fully supporting every facet of the various specs, often to the point of overkill &/or confusion on the part of the user. BurnAware Home is one of many nice enough burning apps, & while it won't hold your hand, it is easier to use than Imgburn or a lot of other freeware. The only thing it adds that's a bit different is data recovery from a damaged disc, though I can't say how well or even if it'll work if/when you ever need it to. [You can see some similar recovery utilities here http://www.computer-realm.net/ways-of-retrieving-data-from-unreadable/ ] Usually if there's a disc you can't read it's because of physical damage, so most recovery methods focus on repairing the disc's surface -- recovery software generally just reads what it can & let's you decide if the results are usable.
Some burning apps, including BurnAware Home offer a few extra capabilities that might look nice on paper or screen, but don't always mean that much anymore -- at the top of that list is creating a bootable CD/DVD... If you created a "Slipstreamed" disc, adding SP 1, 2, or 3 to XP, & then created a install disc, you needed this. Before that the need was rare, & since then I haven't seen much of any use for this feature. Multi-session discs used to be cool back when hard drives were much smaller & blank discs were much more expensive -- they let you get something off your small hard drive & onto a disc, even though you didn't burn enough data to come close to filling it... once you finally filled the blank disc you could finalize it & have something that worked pretty much normally. Nowadays most folks either wait until they have enough to fill a disc, burn a partially filled disc & don't worry about wasted space, &/or combine the data from the partially filled disc with enough new stuff that it pretty much fills a new blank disc. Personally, at ~$18 per 100 DVDs [& CDs for almost 1/2 that] it's not worth it to me to do more than burn a disc, label it with a Sharpie, & put it away.
BurnAware Home itself should be a portable app, with everything added to the single program folder, & the only registry entry being for uninstall -- If you use it portably that uninstall key is of course unneeded. That said, while it installed just fine in my regular win7 ult 64, I recorded some unusual registry activity in 2 VMs when checking out the GOTD install... In win7's XP Mode VM [using Microsoft's Virtual PC] I got several new entries & even more registry changes, all having to do with other software I'd previously installed. In a win7 HP 64 VM using VirtualBox I got a Huge number of registry changes ["New keys: 199837, New values: 310867, Changed values: 8, Total changes: 510712"] -- I've no idea why. Hopefully that's just a "Huh?"...
Tips... Research your drives/burners, DVD &/or Blu-Ray players, & the brands [and types] of discs they like & don't like -- myce.com & videohelp.com are 2 good sources. Some players will handle most anything you can stick in them, while others might be extremely picky. Some burners just do not like certain brands of discs, or burn them in a way that your player might have issues with, never mind that same player might handle the same brand burnt on another PC with a different burner. Some drives are great at single layer DVDs, but fall down on dual layer blanks -- other times the reverse is true [e.g. my Optiarc is great with dual layer, but only fair with regular DVDs]. Some blank discs are counterfeit. DVD & Blu-Ray blanks have some data already present telling the burner what settings to use -- cheap discs may *borrow* that data from major brands, so it doesn't really match those discs... how close it comes to matching varies -- you can find out more & learn how you might change the way your burner handles whatever codes checking out discussions re: Media Code Speed Edit. You'll often find that your burner writes discs less accurately the faster the speed is set in your burning software -- you might think of it as the grooves on a vinyl record being less evenly spaced apart, or maybe even a slightest bit wobbly... often DiscSpeed [free from Nero] is used to gauge the quality of a test burn. OTOH you might find that a disc brand [or even a particular batch of a brand] might work best at full, half, or 3/4 max burning speed -- you're usually given a choice of 3 or more speeds. The lifespan of a DVD or Blu-Ray drive mechanism can be as short as a couple of years -- Many times I've read of people questioning their blank discs &/or software only to find out that their drive or player was shot. Finally, it's more rare but still possible to lose UDMA for your optical drives in win7 -- if your drive is very slow check it out [Google].
You might notice that none of those tips says much of anything about software -- you'll find the same sort of hardware bias if you check out the forums for Imgburn... there just aren't many software issues with burning anymore. You might have used a bad app to create your [DVD] video files, but generally the bad files will be burned just fine. That said, several apps will offer burning capabilities as a convenience -- not as their main purpose. Personally I gave up on using such "convenience" features long ago, sticking with burning apps that specialize in burning rather than having it tacked on as an afterthought.