Acadia, sorry to hear about your problems.

I use Nero exclusively for all my DVD/CD burning and I have had very very few problems with it since version 5 and I am on 7 now. I am an IT tech support person though so when I do have problems I'm lucky enough to be able to solve them myself. :)

Just one thing that I haven't seen mentioned here is that different brands of CD's and DVD's work better with with some brands of writers than others. Over the years I have had to give away quite a few blanks because my writers didn't like them. Verbatim is my brand of choice and has been for a long time though as they are much better than most.

The trick of lowering the write speed is really good advice. Often disks that fail badly after a high-speed write will do just fine at lower speeds. I bought a spindle of 100 I-Mation disks and created about 5 or 6 coffee cup holders before I lowered the speed, and then I wrote about 90 disks on the trot without any failures.

IMHO verifying the contents of each disk I write is critical! I know that the error correction system in burners and readers will compensate for some bad information read off the disk but I prefer to know that the disk contents are 100% when I am storing critical stuff. I also very seldom have disks fail verification after being written. This is obviously after I have verified that the blanks work well with my writers though.

It's also important to understand that there is a lot of technical stuff going on in the background when you write disks, and there is a list as long as my arm of things that can cause bad writes, sometimes only in one brand of software while others work fine.

I hope this info helps and good luck with your problems! :)