[Larryh]

Ended up solving my own problem. (Ain't that the way.)

Turns out I had to change some device settings on my Adaptec 2940UW Pro card -- specifically as they applied to my HP9200e, CD-RW.

Seems Adaptec's defaults were just too much for the HP drive. I had to DISABLE WIDE NEGOTIATION for the HP drive AND drop the transfer rate to 5Mb/s.

MS and my HP9200 seem to do just fine now. (FWIW, I discovered that this wasn't specifically related to MS -- because other software showed the same issues.)

Since I'm not a SCSI wizard, I'm not sure why -- even with the old settings on the SCSI adapter -- repeated "requests" to "rip" a track to my HD -- would eventually succeed, leaving the CD-R drive in a "working state." Once it was in this state it would continue to work until a reboot. After that, I'd have to try and try again until -- for some reason -- it would reach this "working state."

Anyway, if anyone's having similar issues, I post this for what it's worth.