got so fed up with the bizarre windows/drive freezing issues i was having with my main optical drive that i plugged in my IDE DVD-RAM drive over a USB adapter and tried to put my next DVD to burn in there. The drive wouldn't read the disc at all though, and after a few minutes of bewildered disc swapping I realized that I'd fallen prey to a long-dead problem.
The DVD-RAM drive I was using was from the era when not all optical drives supported both dash and plus media. It's a Panasonic LF-D521 from 2003 that doesn't read plus media. All my dual-layer DVD's are DVD+R DL's from Verbatim. For some reason it's very difficult to find dual-layer DVD-R's that are dash media instead of plus. Maybe the plus were slightly cheaper to produce on the dual-layer end? Anyways, very funny that I'm having the problems that would've irritated forum posters 20 years ago. i guess i'll just tolerate the Pioneer drive's funkiness.