[ddouglass]

Sorry for not getting into this before but I have been out of town this weekend in the country and had no internet.
First thing to understand is not all drives will read CDG files correctly.
Let me start by saying just because a drive says that it is good for CDG, does not necessarily mean it will be. Many laptop drives especially the older CD only drives just would never work. Thus many who use laptops usually carry an external dvd drive. More of the later DVD drives will work but still with laptops your chances of a working drive are less than those full size internal drives in a desktop computer.
As far as lasers wearing out. I have had drives that would read and write just fine one day and die the next day. In most cases it isn't instantaneous failure but a fact that the laser light will weaken just beyond the capability of the sensor to be able to read it correctly.
The test that Hoster and Microstudio use only tests the drives controller to see if it understands the command structure used for CDG file transfer. It cannot test the read and write capability of the drive mechanism itself.
Showing the cdg list on a disk, is nothing more than reading the table of contents of the disk. All Microstudio does is filter it to read the name on only .CDA files, which can also only me regular music files or CDG files.