Okay, I know it's not the ideal setup, but for something like this which will only be for fun and won't be shown in 5.1 at feativals, I figure it's not that big an issue.
what I meant by something set up wrong I was that the settings in vegas may have been changed since I removed and reinstalled vegas. Did this a few times to try to deal with a different issue. Now things seem to be previewing differently than before.
Should 5.1 audio like I have perform this way with 2 speakers?

There is really no way to tell if it is performing properly when you can only preview through 2 speakers.

For what it's worth, when it monitor the audio in the mixer everything looks as it should- projector only in the rear and the rest of the audio only in the front. Makes no sense why it's working differently than before, but maybe the vegas settings then were messed up. Oh well. Thanks fo ryour help.

jsnkc is absolutely right. Without center or rear speakers, how do you expect to hear what's going on there? Downmixing is accomplished at the DVD player or receiver. That's where the 5.1 mix becomes stereo. In the authoring stage, the individual channels are just that; individual. With the outputs going nowhere, any audio going to those outputs is not going to be heard.

Okay, if I understand you correctly then I shouldn't hear that projector sound at all when previewing as it is only in the rear speakers and I don't have any rear speakers. As I remember, this is how Vegas and DVDA used to behave for me before I uninstalled and reinstalled 4.0d.
What struck me as odd was that I did and still do hear the projector during these previews.
However, the dvd did turn out fine, so it's cool. I know I need surround and center speakers, but right now I'm more concerned about getting a better external monitor and seeing how practical it would be to add an AC/DC converter for field use.
Thanks for the help!

if I am not wrong I think you can set in the audio preference which device to use to listen to the audio. If you set the same graphic card for both the rear and front channles you should be able to listen to all the channels in just two speaker (obviosuly with not surround effects, but at least you can check the audio is right).

This is also useful if you don't have a surround audio card but you still want a pseudo-surround effects. Usually many of us has got a audio card in the mainboard + a second audio card, e.g., soundbluster. Set the first as the audio device for the rear channels, the second one as the device for the front channels. At this point the only thing you need is to have 4 speakers (but this is very cheap as compared to a surround card!) and the pseudo-surround effect is given!

I use this system for having an idea of the final surround effects and it works quite well.

I hope this can be usefull for some of you

Bye