>Did I ever say I hate computers...
I haven't said that... in the last 15 minutes.
My coworker Bob (who doesn't hang out here, and is incredible with hardware, says it regularly).
Why is Media Jukebox slow at ripping while the other programs you mentioned (in a different thread) fast? It could be that the cdrom was running with DMA while they were running, and magically switched off for MJ. (I'm pretty sure that MJ will not switch off this setting.)
I think you may have an intermittent hardware failure (this is the worst kind of problem in the world, it is almost impossible to track down). Can you find a friend to have a "testing party" and swap everything you can think of to track it down?
What kind of PC do you have, and what OS? In particular, if you have a PC from, for example, HP, say "I've got the Hewlett Packard version of XP"