Need some help troubleshooting a combo optical

Alright, the short of it is that I recently purchased this combo drive and I'm having some major trouble with it. I suppose it's more a question of wether or not I got a faulty drive.

The symptoms are as follows:

- Refuses to autoplay any CDs except for audio
- Any attempt to access a CD results in Windows saying it isn't a valid win32 application.
- Refuses to play the majority if not all of the tracks on an audio disk entirely, but will sometimes play certain aparently random tracks flawlessly.
- Similar issue when ripping with dbPowerAmp; most if not all of the tracks will simply fail, and ocasionally a couple might rip properly.

Oddly enough however, DVDs seem to run just fine. I'm watching the fourth disk of Battlestar Galactica season oneright now and it's not skipping, or anything.

So, I'm at a complete loss as to what exactly to do in order to decide wether or not this thing is faulty or if there's something I can do about it. No experience in this department.

Any help and advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Alas, the only other desktop in the house finally bit it. It was an old Dell from 96.

I will do a little more looking around trying to figure it out, and then RMA it. The worst that could happen is they could tell me its fine, so meh.

Previous drive was pretty well out. Skipped awfully, was just no good anymore. Couldn't do much with it.

No funny noises at all, sounds fine. Not very noisy at all actually, which I like.

Unfortunately I have no software for ripping a DVD, so I can't check that.

Not that I don't enjoy a good name brand bashing, but care to reccomend something else?

I'd go with Pioneer.

I agree with who ever said get a DVD RW. Both Lite-On and NEC makes good DVD burners for $40. I'm currently using a NEC 3500, I think the most recent model is 3550, and have never had a problem. Have Lite-On CDWR combo in the Kids computer and never any problems. As an aside, if anyone wants to test the durability of a piece of equipment, put it in a kid's computer. It's not that they necessarily abuse a computer, though some do, but they're used hard. The difference between driving a car slow and easy vs pushing it most of the time.