to ianymaty
Thanks for the leads. I have been to the manufacturers websites multiple times and the firmware was not listed in their docs, only through the utilities so I missed it. Oh, well. I had the LG maxed out on the firmware already but the LiteOn was new and likely had to do with their internal identification issues, though whatever their fix was it seems to have worked. I had to install the update in safe mode. Is this a typical behavior? The LG updated during a normal session. I also reduced my memory by 2gigs as XP apparently only does 4gigs max and according to some opinions has problems when it has too much. I also increased the virtual memory page size but I doubt this had any effect as I was messing with another piece of software (old DVD shrink with the "out of memory error." Didn't help that app either.
Regardless, I just had a successful burn and verify with the units and they worked. I will run ImgBurn through it paces tomorrow and see if the fix holds up.
to LIGHTNING UK!
I read that you have a bunch of optical drives in your various machines, have you run into the issue with XP and identical optical drives not being properly addressed and recognized (SATA)? http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-xp/two-new-dvd-drives-will-not-work-code-42/192082.html
Also, when reading the hardware info, I read that I have a lot of loaded legacy drivers. I have never examined the guts of XP in that detail, is that normal?
To mmalves, thanks for the hardware info link. It led to the update.