thanks troy512, but as mentioned in post 41 at the end of second paragraph there was no difference from going to firmware 1.18 from 1.13 that was in before. my source drive is maxtor 6V300F0 sata2 for the files to burn, atapi.sys is 5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158) and motherboard is asusa8r-mvp with athlon 64x2 dual-core 4200+ cpu 1gig 162ns ram. by giving affinity to processor 1 for alltoavi for compressing mpeg transport stream files to avi and affinity to processor 0 to os and nero i can burn all evening and compress about 24/7 the satellite captures my receiver makes on usb drives.
the only thing that made a real difference was burning at 8x instead of 4x to make 19/20 dvds compare 100% ok with source files. i insist on this compare instead of just a verify that checks for read errors on target but doesn't completely ensure identical files on source and target. even if the crc check doesn't say something is wrong it doesn't mean the files are totally ok.