Paranoid? Ha! I'm worse - I have 2 whole PC's that virtually mirror each other. With a total of 9 harddisks on them. I've burned literally thousands of CD's over the last 10 years and very few indeed have been bad. None that I know of have gone bad after time, all the bad ones were bad right away. I'm a multimedia producer, so CD-ROMs are my game. Never had a master sent back from the factory, ever. Nor a DVD master. --------------------------------------------------- Basic rules: (some of this has already turned up in the posts above) 1. Burn as slow as you can put up with. With important discs, do it at 4x or maybe 8x, not more. 2. Have a high quality burner (Sony, Plextor and similar) 3. Use TOP brand name CDs ONLY!!!!!! I only use TDK, Sony and the like, preferably gold (very hard to find these days) - but I'll put up with silver. (Don't use blue or green CDs) 4. Writing on them is OK if you use a good CD pen and the CD is laquered for writing. Labels are no good, they most often put the disc out of balance and in today's fast drives that's fatal. 5. Use a good burning app and always close the disc right away, no adding, ever. 6. Be very sure that your burner and the CDs you use like each other. This is not as self evident as you think, htere realy is an 'analog' side to this, some just don't like other. For instance, my Plextor SCSI burner (top notch) HATES Memorex discs. 7. If you can't read a disc, try it in other drives, lots of other drives. You may well find one that reads it. Especially a slow, old drive. This 52x nonsense.... ridiculous. The CD technology was never meant to be pushed to that speed, it equals many harddisks rotational speed. 8. Keep discs cool and dark, standing up. 9. Avoid damaging them, polishing them, anything at all.... and as someone pointed out, the top side is the critical foil side, the plastic side is exactly that - a thick piece of stabilising plastic. 10. NEVER have discs lying in piles. Always back in the jewel case right away. 11. Don't use soft pockets and such, use true jewel cases or at least Digipak. :] Fish