I've been having great luck with my new Optiarc DVD AD-7170A burner but suddenly its started to burn in a strange fashion. It appears to be taking forever to burn disks and instead of a continual burn, its intermittently burning the disk as if its burning than momentarily pausing. I'm using the same high quality Verbatim DVD +R Disks and I didn't change any settings in Nero that I'm aware of. Any ideas what would be causing this?

Sounds like the burner has reverted from DMA mode to (MUCH slower) PIO mode. If so, this can be adjusted as follows: In the Device Manager (via the Control Panel>>System>>Hardware>>Device Manager), you simply have to remove the applicable IDE channel (Click on "IDE...Controllers") and let your computer reset it to DMA as follows: Right click on the pertinent channel in Device Manager Click on uninstall Reboot After rebooting go back to Device Manager and change the setting to "DMA if available"...

That was it! I was panacked thinking the burner was defective since I just got it a couple weeks ago. Your the greatest! Thanks a bunch for the help.