I'm having a very strange problem and I hope someone can help.

Nero is no longer able to verify my discs after it burns them. The burn completes successfully. Then, when data verification begins, Nero appears to "hang" (after 25-30% complete). I press the abort button, I get a message from Nero saying "Aborting...", but Nero never comes back to me. I turn off the drive. Nero is then able to complete aborting the verification. It's looks like the drive just stops responding after it burns. I've tried burning slower (4X), same problem. It's happened consistently (5 DVDs in a row).

Nero says the burn is OK and CDCheck confirms this (I compared with the data still on my hard disk).

I've had no problems for at least six months. This problem started happening today. Yesterday I had to reformat my boot partition and reinstall Windows XP. All my video DVDs play perfectly in this drive. Alcohol can mount images from this drive and the data appears to be fine.

I'm using the same disks (Verbatim). No problems until today, after Windows was reinstalled.

The DVD writer is a Pioneer, external DVR-S806. It's a USB device. I have the latest firmware. When I bought the drive, I just plugged it in without installing any additional software. Like I said before, not one problem until Windows was reinstalled.

I reinstalled XP and got all the updates from Windows Update. Is there something else I need to install?