First of all let me start out by saying that this may be something that many of the techno-Gurus here already know, but when I was having the problem I searched for anything relating and found nothing. But I eventually stumbled on to the answer and thought I would post it here for any novice-intermediate users such as myself who may be experiencing the same problem. My problem began after having burned dozens of DVD's (1:1, custom authored, 9 to 5's, etc) successfully with no problems. So a couple of days ago I go to burn yet another DVD same as always, and since I had been having such great success, like a doofus, I didn't do a test burn to DVD-rw. Well I got a coaster. But I had done some mucking around in the IFO files with IFOEDIT, and even though I had done so in the past with great success, I thought maybe this time I would have to live with the garbage before the movie (trailers and whatnot. So I reloaded the original IFO's and still feeling a it lazy didn't do a test burn. Another coaster. So now I'm starting to get worried, so I decide to do another movie. A simple 1:1 copy nothing fancy, and I finally wise up and do a test burn to dvd-rw. Again nothing. Well I shouldn't say exactly "nothing", because that is what was wierd. It would go through the motions like it was burning just fine, and show success with no errors. But even though all the files showed up as if they had all burned correctly, they either wouldn't play or played truncated and all out of sequence. And the playback result was the same on software players and standalones. Suddenly I can't burn a single dvd that will play on anything. So I'm going crazy wondering what in the blue blazes happened "overnight" to cause this. And then I remember that the day prior I had installed an "update" from Microsoft for XP. And while this may have ultimately been the source of my troubles, uninstalling it did not rectify the situation. So I start looking around in the properties of my DVD recorder (Pioneer A04), because I'm thinking I'm going to have to do the uninstall/reinstall routine. And I see this tab that I had never seen before (not that it wasn't there, just hadn't noticed it before) called "Recording". So I read the little explanation for "Desktop Cd Recording" and it sounds similar to packet writing software like Roxio's DirectCD. The little box that says "enable CD recording on this device" is checked. I'm thinking this is probably not a good thing, so I uncheck it, reboot, and viola! I can burn DVD's again. Now since I know that I didn't check that box (since I had never seen it before), I'm thinking that for some ungodly reason the Windows XP update file caused it to be checked. So like I said in the beginning I just thought I would post this as a heads up to anyone that may experience similar problems.

Many thanks for the heads up. I'm sure i will encounter this problem in the not so distant future.

Uhm this could be a dumb question, but is there a really a FAQ on DVD-r in XP? Just wondering, looking for hints to make my new setup work (win XP, a04)

Really? XP really has problems buring in XP? I never heard this before (OK, granted I'm really new to this) ...So is there FAQ i should read for setting up XP? Creating dual boot win 98se is a bit of a challege, I have 4 120 gb hard drives all filled to the brim in NTFS filing system, lord know how I'm going to create a FAT32 partition. Is ANYONE here successfully burning in WIN XP?

I've never used my A03 in anything but XP. I've had a few problems like anyone else, but I wouldn't blame the OS for any of my own errors or cheap discs. XP detects my A03 as running in Multi-Word DMA Mode 2. Now that I finally settled on my media decision (Apples & PrimeDiscs) and software (RecordNow Max) I havn't had any bad discs in several months.

Like I had said I have had very little problem burning other than this one mystery (at least it was to me) event. And since resolving the issue I have burned several more with no problems. On the other hand i found ME to be completely unreliable. And my ME system wouldn't even play divx at all (even though divx is slightly off topic in the DVD section) And in response to Ghamu, I was not actually referring to any Microsoft FAQ (not sure if there is one or not), but merely used FAQ as a play on acronyms in the subject line, since I could previously find no information recarding my dilema.

I run Windows XP, and when burning to either my A03 or A04 drive with either RecordnowMax, Nero, or Primo I get perfect DVD's everytime, so how can it be XP?

I tried WindowsME last year and promptly deleted that POS version of windows. Its junk, I don't care how much faster WinME is, it crashes all the time and is unstable junk. Win98 is also junk...no way would I try to do video editing on it. I use WinXP with 512 megs of RAM and have no problems burning DVD's or using it for video editing. ________