[Slacker_Deluxe]

Thanks for the information on disabling the wnaspint.dll. That tweak has allowed Microstudio to launch without having to be in Win95/98/Me compatibility mode. This means no drive detection (not even the plain old not CD+G compatible drive is listed) and the latest ASPI drivers from Adaptec's site (v4.71.2) made no difference. I toggled between "Use default driver" and "Use the MTU installed driver" from the "Tools" menu (restarting the app each time) to set the app to use a different one.

Keep in mind that at this point I'm not even trying to get Microstudio to detect my Plextor Firewire drive (which hasn't been connected during this foolishness). I'd like to see the software performing its basic function of detecting my vanilla IDE CD-ROM before moving on to trouble shooting issues with the external device. I'd expect that if the CD driver issue is resolved there won't be any problems with the Firewire device.

At this point I have an XP Pro SP2 system with all of Microsoft's posted updates onto which only Office 2000, Nero 6 (deleted during all this troubleshooting) and MicroStudio have ever been installed. All hardware drivers (MB BIOs and chipset, video, NIC, sound, et al drivers) were updated before any applications were loaded. All in all this was a "clean" install.

I'm still open to ideas or suggestions, but I'm guessing that I'm S.O.L and that my only option is to reinstall MicroStudio on the laptop I'd been using it on in order to actually burn complication disks.