I've had much the same experience. I use a program called "Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 2005" for editing, cleanup and transfer to CD...perhaps a slightly newer version of the one EPN mentioned above. The whole process takes about twice the time as it does to play the record itself. I use the extra time to make pretty pictures for the CD case; and have found that using the Images setting in Google will often get me a .jif of the original album art.