Are you using burning software or something built into windows xp?

Thank God. An oasis in the desert. I am using standard XP Home Edition software. No extras. Except for a direct cd to cd copy now and then, I have never "burned." Up to now I have always had a one-lung dial-up. Only upgraded to DSL three weeks ago. I am partially deaf, so music doesn't do my any good. And As I said, I am using what came with the computer (Gateway).

Thanks for responding so quickly.

Ok. I don't use the cd writng built into Windows so I'm not an expert here.

When you put in a blank cd, go to My Computer and double-click the cd-r drive. It should say "write these files to cd". When you click that it should start the wizard.

That's what I have been doing ll day. The problem is that any files downloaded by the method you cite are in Read Only format when retrieved. That is okay for music or pictures and such, but I am trying to archive document files that may need to be editied or otherwise changed.

All I can think of is to right click on the documents to view it's properties, then uncheck the Read-Only checkbox. Can't swear by it, but I seem to recall that when you re-load the same file after any modification back to the cd, if you didn't change the name, windows would ask if you want to "replace the existing file?". Try it.

im not familiar with xp's writing capabilities.  i use nero's incd (ahead's proprietary packetwriting/formatting application).  the only time ive hadda problem similar to the one youre describing, it was due to a bad rewritable cd. maybe try another one?

I also use nero and I would recommend it.

You might want to try this program.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/cdburnerxp.html

It's free and it's supposed to be good.

Santiago--

I gave your method a try. It was a no go. You can click the "read only" on, but not off. Well, you can click the box off, but then word won't let you do anything with it. You get an error message. It appears that even though you click the read only off, word remembers that it is a read only file. When I got to thinking about it, I realized that this would have to be, for security reasons if nothing else. If you were working in a networking situation where everybodfy has access to a document, you would not want the guy in next cubical calling up your document and making changes to it that you never saw.

I just had a light bulb go off. Since you can change a read only file, but not save it to the same file name. Security again. The guy down the hall can change your document but there is still a copy of the original in the system.) Anyway, that lets me call a document up read only, change it and save it to my hard drive with a different name. Then I can copy it over to the CD with the copy function. This is a long round about process, but it gives me a temporary work-around solution intil I find out why I cannot format CD's . Thanks for the effort.