Hello. Okay the mystery has been solved. I took my old 10-cent Memorex external burner out of the closet, and everything worked perfectly. I have an Alienware computer, and the burner that came with it costs five times what this cheap Memorex cost, and yet it gives out after only two years, whereas this five-year old Memorex burner, covered in closet cobwebs yet, is still kicking butt (and it was faster, both in accessing and burning). Also I found out that another onboard drive that I thought all this time was a CDR-W drive was actually a CDR-W/DVDR-W drive, and so along with the Memorex, I was able to have a source and destination drive, and completely ignore the failed drive.All is well that ends well. At least I learned about a lot of new products, like Rip-it-4-me, FIXvts, and DVDfab. Thanks for the info!P.S. -That Pirate photo was hilarious... 26 Oct 2008 @ 18:44