f1nkster

It's been over a week now, and my PC has not locked up since my last post. I don't know what caused it. ImgBurn continues to run fine with exclusive access to the drive. So I am happy.

The hotfix has fixed the exclusive access problem -- that is, I can burn DVDs with ImgBurn with the exclusive access option checked and it works fine now, every time. However, I am worried the hotfix may have introduced other problems. I leave the PC running 24x7 and for 2 days straight now since I installed the hotfix, I have sat down to the PC to find it locked up -- screen is asleep (does not wake up), no mouse/kb response, nothing -- I can ping it, but cannot map drives from remote PCs. All I can do is reboot. It is possible it may not be the hotfix, but this behavior is new and I've made no other changes. I am giving it a few more days to see if it persists. If so, I will restore my system backup (without the hotfix) and see if the problem goes away.

I am trying the hotfix in the kb article above first. It describes my problem exactly. I backed up my system as a precaution overnight and just installed the hotfix. It will be a few days before I can confidently say that it worked (or not). The short story on the hotfix is that MS acknowledges a problem where the System process locks the drive and prevents programs from gaining exclusive access. It occurs after the system has been running for at least a few hours, which explains why ImgBurn always worked fine after a reboot, but not later. The problem was introduced with Vista SP1. Roxio has been working fine, but as a previous poster said, it may be that Roxio is not locking the drive. In any case, I'm crossing my fingers...I'll post results in a few days. My apologies for suggesting Lightning UK needed to fix his program.

IMAPI on Vista is not implemented as a service. It is a DLL -- CD burning software can call IMAPI functions as needed. So there is no IMAPI process that runs on Vista like it does on XP, and so I am thinking this is not the problem. I unchecked the exclusive access option in ImgBurn settings and so far all my burns have gone well, all verified successfully. I've only burned 2 DVD+RWs today (one was something I actually wanted to burn, the other was a test). So hopefully my future burns go as well. As long as my burns are successful, I can operate this way. Be nice if the developer could determine a solution for this, but I realize that may be easier said than done. f1nkster

A service with this name does not appear in Services on my system. I have Vista Home Premium 32-bit, SP1. I will search Google and see if I can find something about IMAPI for Vista. Thanks for the tip. f1nkster

Not sure what you mean by this...can you explain?

I am also having the exclusive access problem on Vista Home Premium 32-bit, identical to what others have described above. I looked at Process Explorer. The offending process is "System" with PID 4. Not something I can just turn off. Looks like core Vista OS, not a program per se. When I use Roxio, I never have a problem. Roxio appears to know how to handle this. But I really want to use ImgBurn because it allows me to launch jobs from scripts (command-line). Any ideas? f1nkster