Strange behavior from Xilisoft ripper & DVD43 on one of my 2 DVD RW drives & hoping someone familiar with either of these can shed some light. Windows XP with D: a Sony DVDRW (newer & faster) and E: a TDK DVDRW. Apologize for the lenght & appriciate any help.

Have been using Xilisoft AOK for about a year to rip occational music vids from DVDs for iPod viewing on a iPod 5.5G using either DVD drive. In anticipation of purchase of a 160Gb classic, started looking into ripping in a little more detail & decided to give the DVD43 + Handbrake combo a try. (Xilisoft has works very well with a simple interface & nice preview of chapters etc., but not as flexible/powerful as could be).

Got & installed DVD43 & Handbrake & ripped a few videos AOK. Wanted to rip the same ones in Xilisoft & compare results. However, when I started Xilisoft, it would not recognize/read the DVD in the D: (Sony) drive. Further, Windows Explorer shows the drive as a DVDRW until I inserted a DVD, then is shown as a CD drive. Shut down DVD43 & repeated, and all worked AOK. Figured some sort of DVD43/Xilisoft conflict.

However, tried the same thing on E: (TDK) DVDRW drive & Xilisoft works fine (as does Windows explorer) when DVD43 is running - so it is somehow HW specific. Anyone here have any experience with these two software tools?

BONUS QUESTION: Any way so that I can NOT have DVD43 startup on boot, and instead manually start it prior to using Handbrake?

Thanks....