[spooky]

I can see this one is gonna go on for ages.

Firstly most IDE burners are fine for PSX, but steer clear of Phillips based machines (Freecom, Iomega etc.) as these can cause more trouble than their worth, although some people have worked out a way of burning copies with these machines, but it seems a bit of a palava.

You mentioned that you had an LG burner which you fried when trying to upgrade the firmware, well what did you replace it with?

If it was another LG machine then i suggest that you get some TDK media, some burners are fussy about the media you use when burning PSX games (I learnt this through bitter experience first hand).

What model of PSX do you have?, just because it plays originals perfectly does'nt mean it will play backups perfectly, your PSX laser may need tweaking.

Personnaly i recommend using CDRWin, set your read speeds low about 4x and your write speed to 2x, this itself should help reduce FMV skipping and audio problems.

Also take some time to set up your system, dissable any virus software, schedualed tasks, etc. the best way to do this is to go down to your tast bar and click START, then RUN, in the box type "msconfig" without any drive letters, this will bring up a menu, on the top right there is a "start" selection. Here you can remove all the rubbish that runs in the background on your system, for an example i only have "ScanRegistry", "System Tray" and the two "LoadPowerProfiles" #####ed in mine. After doing this you will need to reboot for the settings to take effect. When the system reboots you will have a selective start up warning, just click ok.
You will also loose most of the icons on the right of you task bar but dont worry the programms arnt deleted.

A couple of other quick notes.

Never record "on the fly" always create an image even if you dont have a patch to apply.

I strongly recommend you have an internal mod chip installed as some of these plugmods can cause trouble!

Hope you get it sorted and let me know how you get on!