Mike,
I experienced a similar problem, also under WinXP and with a new Plextor drive. I also had what appeared to be a related problem in that every time you clicked the right mouse button it took several seconds to respond (I think, because it was polling the CD drive to dynamically populate the context menu).
I tried a number of things that seemed to work for a while (uninstalling other software, for example), but then the problem kept reappearing. I finally upgraded to MC9 and haven't had any further problems.
I think the problem may be related to the aspi drivers under WinXP. You can find the aspi drivers in the download section of
http://www.adaptec.com.
The key is that you'll want to download and install the version 4.6 drivers, not the newer 4.7 drivers. Here's a thread that seems to confirm that the 4.7 drivers don't work well under XP, but the version 4.6 drivers do (despite what it says on the adaptec site):
http://www.cdrinfo.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8724I also tried installing the 4.6 drivers, then installing the 4.7 drivers on top of 4.6 -- this also seemed to work okay (but you need to install 4.6 first).
If I recall correctly, this fixed the "Analyzing Devices" problem, but the CD would then only burn in TAO mode, not DAO mode and with no CD-Text (I may not remember correctly, I was trying all kinds of things!).
Another thing I found on several occasions was that when the problem seemed to be fixed, it would reappear again as soon as I burned a CD under MJ8.
Sorry I can't give you a more definitive answer (other than I haven't had any problems since upgrading to MC9) but I was never able to get it to work correctly under MJ8.
Hope you have better luck.
Regards... JG