I know this is like a broken record, but buy CCDStack - light years ahead of DSS. Yes, I know it's pricey (not that bad really), but it makes initial processing a cinch, and 99.9% of the time, faultless.
I had no end of issues with DSS, from running out of memory (on a 16gb RAM system, that was rich!), to it not finding stars (yep... couldn't find enough stars in an Eta Carinae shot or M8 shot...), to simply rancid results (besides taking forever to process a decent sized stack).
Once you go 'stack, you never go back