Gary, I think that Dell is right that the drive is bad. Have you ever had a floppy disk that the drive it was written on could read but no other floppy drive could read it? This is caused by misalignment of the drive head.

In a cd drive instead of a magnet head you have a laser and an photo-diode. the laser emits the light of course and the photo-diode reads the light reflected off the disk. The speed of the read function (48x, 52x, etc) determines the timing for the laser/photo-diode operation. If this timing is off due to a failure or change in component values then the drive may read at some speeds but not at others. I know this sounds complicated but this type of problem does point to a hardware problem and not a software one.

Now that makes sense to me. Misalignment has to be the problem. I never knew exactly how a cd worked. Well i'm confident enuff now to just order me another drive, probably just as cheap as having this one repaired. Thanks so much guys, I really appreciate your help.

I have a plextor 760 that works great. Don't know if any of the 716's are still available but they work great too.