jbclem wrote:

What about the LowerFilter? I'm not sure I even have one, but I've read
suggestions that included the LowerFilter. What exactly are these filters,
and why would changing them affect a problem such as I have.

Hardware has a driver stack.

The UpperFilter and LowerFilter offer opportunities to "filter"
what happens to a piece of hardware. The stack is a protocol stack,
translating from one protocol to another, until eventually a
command is sent to the physical hardware. There are two places
to "shim" in a filter driver, depending on whether you want
to work on the higher level protocol, or interfere with low
level hardware commands. That sort of thing.

A filter driver could be completely transparent ("watch, but don't touch").
Or, it can interact, remove certain commands, and so on. And the
result for the user, is the device could have quite
different behavior.

I don't know what a common mis-behavior is in this case, when
burner software interacts with the optical drive protocol stack.

Looking at your other thread, I would be examining Event Viewer,
for something related to File Explorer or just to optical drives.
Maybe an error is generated, each time the empty window appears.

I would also try:

1) Data disc (maybe with a backup on it)
2) Music disc
3) Installer CD
4) Commercial DVD

as the behavior might be specific to one type.

Perhaps the software path to accessing the disc, is different, and
is a function of the initially determined disc type.

There is a table at the bottom of this page, showing UDF support
on Windows. It cheats a bit, by showing five green blocks. But
UDF 2.5 only comes, if you install the Toshiba UDF driver. I doubt
this is your problem. I think I've had UDF problems, but it
may have been on a Macintosh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/UDF-Reader (example of UDF Reader download, untested)

If this problem was facing me, I would line up test media first,
to test with. An audio CD. A data CD. See which ones work or
which ones fail.

In Linux, I could apply this tool to each of the media samples,
to see how it is recorded. This is apparently available in Cygwin,
but I don't know if that helps matters or not. I don't have Cygwin
installed on WinXP. I have Cygwin somewhere here, and the first
program I tried, failed, because it simply wasn't using Windows
identifiers (it could not possibly have worked). In any case,
I know this works for me in Linux. The package manager usually
has a copy, as long as you turn on all the Repository source buttons.

http://disktype.sourceforge.net/

That program will tell me, for example, that some optical
discs are "dual format" and support more than one access method.

That sort of analysis is only worthwhile, if you notice that
some discs open and read, and others do not. And they're all
nominally CDs. If you notice differences between CD and DVD,
that could either be the content of the media, or dirty or
dead lasers. CD, DVD, Bluray, use different lasers, so it's
possible for CD working, DVD not working, to be a drive
hardware problem.

With a small collection of home computers, I don't work
on these problems enough, to offer a problem
resolution flow chart.

Paul