OK, I give up. My Lite-On is burning more slowly and using more CPU to do it. It used to burn with about 10% of CPU (P4 2.0 GHz). Now it uses 40 - 60% of CPU and crawls when burning the DVD. I am using DVDShrink; WXP Home, SP2. Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know the cause? Would you share it if you did?? Thx.

Have you checked to make sure that it has not been set to PIO mode. (details) Drives that are in PIO will use a lot of cpu and be forced to read or write more slowly.

Otherwise I would look at other possible software problems. I don't think there's any sort of hardware failure on the drive itself that could cause that sort of result.

OK, you are right. The drive was in PIO mode. I am re-running a backup now to see how it does. Thanks for the heads-up and the link to the "how-to."