I downloaded The Pianist and burnt myself and a friend a copy. Both my apex and PowerDVD play it fine, but his sony says there is a region restriction, and his pioneer will play it but the picture skips like the vert hold is off (because of the fact that this is a PAL source I'm guessing).

My question is, if I rip the dvd to my hd, and run it through IFOedit to remove region information, will that correct the vertical hold problem? If not, is there an easy solution?

If you remove the region, it will still be PAL, just region free PAL. If you want to convert to NTSC, then you will need to re-encode it.