I have both of these problems on my home machine but not on my work machine. I did notice one thing. When I first inserted Offspring's Americana in my home machine the track lengths and times were right. I saw that because I cancelled CDDB lookup since I didn't want to go on line at that instant. Later when I logged on and went to CDDB the times and track lenghts and even file sizes grew tremendously, but hey I got song titles. Interestingly the track times got shorter for later songs. When I did some math I saw that the track lenght was the sum of the current track's time plus the times for all subsequent tracks. I just assumed someone put goofy information into CDDB and since MJ takes what it is given without question, I would just have to edit it myself. (Please note the plug for Freedb)
I also cannot rip the last track of an interactive CD on my home machine in digital secure moe. It WILL rip in digital large buffer mode. My work around is to rip all tracks in secure mode, read the report to verify that the track is good, except for the final failure (at time 00:00 even though earlier times in the same track are right). Then I re-rip the last track using digital large buffer.
Finally MJ has great trouble seeing into the interactive part of the CD on my home machine. When I select it in the left pane I get nearly a dozen left pane redraw attempts before it settles down. The directories always appear empty, and MJ wants to go get a plugin from Real, but fails.
I just stay away from those parts of MJ and things go alright. It is a good jukebox and visualization player.
I have seen enough responses to this problem in this forum to know that JRiver believes these are driver problems in win98se, not MJ. So I know we will get no help on those issues here. Everything else works perfectly on that machine so I live with it and use the workaround in MJ.
At work I tried ripping track13 of Americana and the last track rips fine on this win2k machine, CDDB is not accessible here so track times look good. Browsing the data part of the disk did not cause any left pane redraw repeats but did call up a firewall password dialog and then tried to download something from REAL which failed. Now MJ appears hung with a please wait...gathering information dialog box and the inability to redraw its right pane when selected. The please wait, gathering information dialog will not clear when I press cancel, so it looks like that part of the problem with interactive CDs is similar on both machines. I can clear the dialog box with the close window control. The directories all appear to be empty.
There is apparently a lot going on here and it behaves differently on different machines and operating systems. It is clear that MJ is far more stable on the later windows versions, which is not surprising. Newer op systems are not going to help those of us with oder hardware unfortunately, so I will just keep living with it as it is. Which is, in the words of Jerry Pournelle, "infuriatingly excellent".
Good luck.
Sentient