Have EMC-8 installed on this laptop (EMC-10 is on my desktop and no problem there) , and that is when first noticed the issue, but not sure it is related to EMC-8.

Toshiba Tecra M3 running XP pro. Windows Explorer will not recognise the presence of a blank (even a blank formatted) CD or DVD in the Matshita DVD-RAM UJ-630S drive. Driver re-installation not work - no updated driver available. Have tried numerous brands of media (Verbatim, Sony, etc)

EVERYTHING ELSE WORKS ON THE CD/DVD DRIVE. It will read CD/DVD (with Explorer or from within other programs such as EMC-8) as long as there is content on the CD/DVD. It will also burn CD/DVD in EMC10 (or Imgburn), though sometimes a program will refuse to recognise that there is a blank writable media in the drive (such as when tried to use Ghost 14 to burn a recovery disk).

I can usually work around this issue (if the media will not read in Explorer, I know it is blank), but would dearly love to "fix" the issue as it is a bit of a pain not being able to totally rely on Explorer to take a quick look at a disk.

I recognise that may or may not be related to Roxio software (and maybe I deserve to be flamed), but my own googling has not found any answer for this quirk.

Has anyone else out there experienced this?

Print out and follow the Clean Install to the letter! Here

Yes- did that several times with EMC-10 (to the letter) on the laptop before finally taking your suggestion (from 2 months ago) and got a new hard drive in the laptop and started over re-installing all the various software, settings, data etc (lots of fun!). But this time I decided EMC-10 was too much for the laptop, so put the EMC-10 on my new Vista desktop, and put EMC-8 (which I have had for several years) on the laptop.

Also, this time around I use Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image 11 to save an image BEFORE putting on any Roxio product on any machine, so I can go back to the previous image rather than go by way of clean install

Thanks for responding

Do the clean install to the letter.

Images also include flaws.

MYSTERY SOLVED (I hope)

I later noticed that the properties of the CD/DVD drive did not include the tab for "recording" (open"My Computer" in XP right click on CD/DVD drive - properties - should be a tab for "recording).

I had to go into registry with regedit and follow Microsoft Support Bulletin 316529 and edit the appropriate registry entry so that the CD/DVD drive was designated as "2". Somehow it had been changed to a "3" (I know it was originally "2" because I did a restore with Norton Ghost to a few days prior and it was a "2" in the older image). Not sure which program or update caused the switch.

XP does not recognise a "3" as a recordable device (hence will not access blank media - only media that can be read - treating the drive as if it was a -ROM drive - read only).

After changing the registry to designate the drive as a "2", the recording tab showed up on the properties, and under that tab I enabled the drive to write - and since then it recognises when a blank DVD or CD is in the drive.

All that is left is to check out all the elements of EMC-8 to make sure they all still work properly (fingers crossed).

In case anyone gets this mixed up with the filter entries issue, the registry key at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CD Burning\Drives holds a Volume entry for each of your installed drives which has values for
CurrentCDWriteSpeed
Drive Type
MaxCDWriteSpeed

It is the Drive Type value which gets changed.

Regards,
Brendon