ive been curious for a long time what the difference is between a "quick erase" and a full erase on a cd-rw. burrrn, eac, and even windows have this "quick erase" feature built in. are there any advantages to doing a full erase, or does it just take alot longer?

I think the difference is that a quick erase just erases headers, lead in and lead out and other whatnot. This causes CD readers and writers to think the disc is empty. Only when you burn new data to the disc does your burner actually over-write old data, in basically the same fashion as a computer hard drive works. This means that old data can remain on the disc even after repeated burns.

A full erase, on the other hand, goes over the entire disc and blanks all the data.

I think the general rule of thumb is only use full erase if there is sensitive data on the disc and you really want to get rid of it all. Otherwise, save yourself time and use quick erase.

As Deep_Elem said, a quick erase only blanks the TOC of a disc while full erase blanks everything.

If anyone is backing up critical files, such as a downloaded software purchase etc., and doesn't want to have a CD-RW disc problem such as the possibility of corrupt files it's good to full erase that/those particular disc/discs. Of course I'm basing the above statement on what I personally experienced in the past where I had mulitiple CD-RW discs that contained unreadable files due to solely using quick erase, perhaps it was the fault of my old drive, I don't really known. Hopefully modern drives are better, then again I still full erase my backup discs just to make sure.

Pandora's box has been opened.

Now we'll have subjective audiophiles declaring how they hear a night and day difference between CD-RWs full erased and quick erased before burning.

Well, there may be differences in writing on a fully erased and a quick erased disc: Suppose that the first write used half the disc, the second write (after quick erase) takes up the full disc. You may well experience a jump in C1 error rates starting from the middle of the disc as the recording layer reacts just a tiny bit different to the laser depending on how much (or at all) it has been written on before. If the laser adjusted perfectly to this change, it wouldn't be a problem, but in reality it doesn't, and it usually isn't much of a problem anyway