Billy W - Next time it happens, you can add a name to the GUEST,
as in GUEST,BWeeks. It does help people decide whether you're just trolling or actually are someone who wants help - or to be helpful.

And if you're consistent (if it happens more than once), you'll be able to find your guest posts instead of just "all of the anonymous guests' posts" should you wish to. There are 80,936 posts by "GUEST" as of today, which would make it tough to sort out yours, but "Guest, Shimrod" just above has only about 1600 to look through.

V Tam - I would think that gold or silver doesn't really matter much on recordable CDs or DVDs (and the silver is usually aluminum, just for the record). That layer is just a "reflector" and the only requirement is that it must provide a smooth, or smoothly varying, "background" for the "dots" in the photosensitive layer.

If the "burn" laser can change the photosensitive materials, then ambient light, heat, and chemicals can change them back or change them more, with the result that the data is lost no matter how bright and shiny the gold (which could be brass) is. Information on the really critical parts of the disks is always proprietary and there's really little published information on what various makers use, and possibly less information on how a specific disk construction can be expected to behave in storage.

John