Shotgun2> Eh, it's no big deal. I've just been a little cranky this week. But thanks for all you've said. It's gone a long way towards lightening my mood.
Back to business...
The RAM test that happens when you first turn the computer on isn't nearly thorough enough. The type or RAM tester I'm referring to will write data to each individual block of RAM and try to read it back. The ones I've seen will do this several times in order to test the integrity of your RAM. CheckIt is such an application. Unfortunately, it's not free. I'm not sure what else is out there, or what's good. Maybe somebody else in here has had experience with a few that can comment?
SCSI - while your SCSI CD-Writer may be slower than the IDE one, the data transfer rate of SCSI is higher than IDE. So SCSI devices are typcially faster than their IDE counterparts. Basically the data going to and coming from the device moves faster on SCSI. Now, the device itself may be slower, like in the case of your two CD-RW drives, but that's mainly age difference, I would imagine.
I'm afraid not much of that helps with your MJ problem, though. I'm really stumped there. First of all, I'm not experiencing the same problem (apparently neither are the JRiver guys). And secondly, there's nothing about your symptoms or system that really obviously point to any culprit. Can you think of any specific thing that you do, or your system does before this happens? Not immediately before, but at any time? Or during? Or is it specific songs? Are there specific songs that this DOESN'T happen with? Anything we can do to narrow it down will help the guys fix it.
It's just like the problems I was having when MJ would crash when switching to mini-me. After narrowing it down further and further, I finally discovered it was because MJ didn't like the "˙" character in Queensr˙che. That's something they may have never found unless they, too, had an artist with a special character like that in its name in their library. So anything we can do narrow the problem down is a big step to getting it fixed.