OK, I have isolated the bug, further. I have removed the slave 200 Gig hard drive, (it was just extra storage) a USB 2.0 PCI card, and the scanner to reduce psu overload. I have also unhooked the master dvd burner, further reducing power usage. I then hooked up the slave dvd burner as a master (cable select jumper) and fired up the computer. My first attempt to back up a movie with dvd shrink, the preview box showed the jerking around that I've previously described, and the timer indicated that it would take 1 hr. 10 min. to back-up, preparatory to burning. I then shut down and rehooked up the same burner, using only the slave connector on the ribbon cable. That was the only change I made. I re-tried dvd shrink, and this time the video screen showed smooth and rapid back-up, and the timer indicated that the movie would back-up in 15 minutes. Anybody know what the heck that means? As a pure wild guess, does that mean that the area of the cpu that handles the master traffic from the secondary IDE interface is going bad? (Hoping I used correct terminology there.) PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml