I've been struggling quite some time to get this done and couldn't find anything about it on macosxhints, Apple Discussions, or the Roxio Toast forums, so here we go...
I wanted to burn a folder to DVD and needed it to look exactly the way I set it up in Finder (custom background image, icon view with custom positioning), just like a lot of install media or downloadable DMGs. You could do something like this with earlier versions of Toast, but I never got it to work with OS X 10.4.x and Toast 7/8.
So I created a folder, put everything in it, hit Command-J, and tried burning it with Disk Utility and Toast 8. Since the background image and the size of the folder window got lost, I decided to give disk images a try. I used Disk Utility to create an image, put the folder content directly into it, put the folder itself into the image and so on. I even used all of the available options in Disk Utility to convert the image and did the same (image creation, conversion, etc.) within Toast.
Eventually it worked, and I had burnt a Mac-only DVD with my folder (and its custom look) on it. I put the DVD in my trusty Cube just to see if it works there, too. And guess what? It did not, the background image was not there, but still visible on my MacBook Pro where I had burnt the DVD!
Now I realized that the folder on the DVD had the same properties as the original on my Desktop. Using Command-J on it, revealed to me that its associated background image was the file residing still on my Desktop and, of course, removing this image file resulted in the same "background-less" view as on the Cube. So the trick is to also burn the background image.
Since this is not done automatically I did the following:
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070216063522395