Kay here's the setup:
Custom built about 3yrs ago
XPpro (all updates and hotfixes installed)
A7N8X Deluxe rev1.4 (all bios and chipset drvrs current)
AMD 1.4 (never O/C'd)
512MB pc2100DDR
80gb Maxtor (Primary boot, and program files drive)
20gb W.D. (Backups drive, MP3s, photos and what-not's)
Plextor 16/10/40
Delta DVDrom
GeForce3 (never O/C'd)

Now here's the deal,
I've been using CloneCD for burning backups for all my music for a long long time. Used-to-be I could burn a full audio disc in 5min or so with the Plexy maxed out at 16x. In fact when the burn would start the buffers would drain in seconds. Now it takes me well over 10, sometimes 15 min and the buffers never use up more than 97%. Used-to-be I could burn a disc with Clone and listen to MP3s with Musicmatch all at the same time no prob and still get a good burn in 5 min. Now if I even THINK about launching Musicmatch while Clone is running the machine lags reeeeal bad, and Musicmatch playback is choppy and unlistenable. For that matter if I try to open ANYTHING while I have a burn going on (even the TaskManager) it takes at least a minute or so to get the program fully launched and in full display. CloneCD is not the only burn ute. that has problems, Roxio6 is slow too.

This never used to happen, when I say never I mean I started noticing a slow-down about a month or so ago. I make a habbit of defragging once a month on a need-it-or-not basis (just defragged last week with Norton's Speed Disk), I also run SpyBot religiously. Have plenty of room on my HDD's (the 80G'r has 60G's free-space). I don't have any unnecissary garbage launching at startup. In fact MSCONFIG/startup is down to less than six items starting. Systray has, at most; NortonA/V, ZoneAlarm, Immersion, and the necissary MSN dial-up apps running at any one time. I've ran "chkdisk /r" from XP's startup disc to no affect. The only other clues I can give you are some warnings in the event log; event= warning, source= cdrom. Error properties say, "An error was detected on device/ DeviceCdRom0/ during a paging operation".

I need your help! Why is this happening suddenly? Is there something I can do other than reformat? I have a Dial-up connection (not by choice mind you) and I'm really not looking forward to D/Ld'ing all the patches, drivers and updates.

ANY help, I mean ANNNNYYYY help is much appreciated.

IMO MM sucks id suggest switching to a differnt program such as winamp. have you tried buring music with any other appilications?

Yes, I've used other burning pgms too (Roxio6) and it burns slower than CloneCD. MusicMatch is not the problem. MM has always been good to me. It rips no problem. It's just when I burn burn-on-the-fly. What baffles me is, it never used to do this before.

Thanks

have you changed your bios settins recently?

It's acting like the CD-burner DMA settings are screwed up in either the BIOS or in the Device Manager. This also fits in with the error messages that you mentioned earlier.

My prefered ripper is EAC (Exact Audio Copy) from http://www.ExactAudioCopy.de -- it works wonders with scuffed CDs.

Beta version only, scarry

Not that scary -- I've been using EAC for over four years, and it's always been beta, but it's always been quite useful, and it keeps getting better and better.

Kay I just changed DMA settings on the Primary IDE channel (houses BootDrive and Plextor). Device0 was set to PIO Olny, while Device1 was set to DMA. Device0 should be the hard drive though!?!? How would that affect anything? I'm not sure how the whole DMA thing works, infact I thought the nForce2 chipsets did not support DMA?
Anyhow, now I've ran out of blank CDs so I can't even test this new setting.

All modern chipsets, including nForce, support DMA. Every modern IDE device should be set for DMA. PIO modes are vastly more CPU-intensive, as you have discovered; "programmed I/O" versus "direct memory access" -- get it?

Another important note: NEVER put a CD/DVD drive on the same IDE channel as a hard drive if it can be avoided. CD drives only support UDMA 33, and the bus access is only as fast as the slowest device -- so your whiz-bang UDMA 133 hard drive has just had 75% of its speed shaved off. The other reason is that since the bandwidth is shared between devices on each channel it will slow things down somewhat. Reserve the primary channel for main hard drives and the secondary channel for removable-media devices or backup hard drives where slow access is acceptable.

Actually No, the UDMA/EIDE connection on most boards in the past 2 years actually enable devices of different "speeds" to connected on the same IDE Channel without loss!