Investigating, more or less per Russ's suggestions:

In MY COMPUTER there is no icon for Multimedia, as there was in Win 98 SE. Remember, this is XP PRO.

With a commercial music CD in the drive, I went to MY COMPUTER. It listed, under removable media drives, A: (as 3-1/4 drive) and "D: Audio CD".

When I insert a commercial music CD in the drive, I guess a choice window, to choose the playback program. If I insert my CD-R disk, which I'm now convinced has nothing on it, I do not get this window.

If I have this window I can, of course, play the commercial music CD with my choice of program.

If I cancel this window, or choose "none", and then go to MY COMPUTER, with the known music CD in the drive, I get (besides drive A:) "[Icon] AUDIO CD (D:)" Left clicking on the icon currently runs MusicMatch and proceeds to play the CD.

Putting the presumptively empty CD in the drive, I get no choice window, and in MY COMPUTER I get "[Icon] DVD Drive (D:)" Same thing with a known empty, new CD-R disk. Left clicking on this icon, it directs me to insert a CD disk, although there is the known or presumptively empty disk already in the drive.

On another question: Should I do WAV files or MP3 files for a CD? I know that MP3 files, while much smaller, are a little lower fidelity than WAV. The disks I have are labeled as 80 minute, 700 MB disks, and there is no way my eventual CD is going to be 80 minutes long. I have been making MP3 files so far.

Dave O.