sounds familiar, yes. i never do Export to DVD, for said reasons - a lot of people report that it takes "forever" essentially.
are you using any plugins (like color correction, sharpening, or anything else)? the more plugins you use, the longer it will take to render/export the video.
what i do is always export to Microsoft DV .AVI file (which should be about 9 or 10 GB for a 45 minute video). then, i use MainConcept or Cinemacraft Encoder (aka CCE) to encode the DV .AVI file to MPEG-2, and then it's DVD authoring time!
also, if you want to simply make your "test" video export, to check it out on a TV (or whatever), you should adjust the timeline markers (also known as the "work area bar")... it's the thin yellow bar in te upper area of the Timeline palette. that way, you can export, say, a 5 minute portion of the video, encode/author it, and see how it looks on a TV. that's a BIG time saver, for me... i did a 2-cam of a 95 minute video (tons of edits/cuts between the two cameras, but no filters applied), and that took 8 or 9 hours to export to DV .AVI and then another few hours to encode to DVD MPEG-2 format. oh, and i'm using a machine with similar specs (P4 2.8Ghz with 2GB RAM). i can't complain about the exporting time, though, because the quality is primo.
for that DVD, i had done the 5 minute segment exporting, with various filters, to see which one looked best on a TV set.