First of all, many many thanks to all of you who responded with your various
suggestions. Please forgive me if I don't e-mail everyone individually, but
rather thank you all "en masse'.

Second, an update. Several people suggested to go into Device Manager and
under "properties" to de-select DMA if it was selected. This sounded a
logical possibility. Funny enough, though, when I clicked on the
"properties" button, nothing happened. No dialogue came up at all. So, this
indicted perhaps another whole level of problem.

In the end, however, based on my own troubleshooting, I was pretty convinced
that the problem lay in the drive itself, so I bit the bullet and went out
on Saturday and bought a new one. The "defective" one was only a 6x to begin
with, and since I felt a repair was not worth it given the low prices of new
drives,  I took the opportunity for a few dollars to get a 32x. Popped it
in, and lo and behold, no more problem! Everything installs just fine, every
single CD that I have tried works flawlessly now.

However, one interesting little tidbit. The new drive was recognized
immediately by Win 95 (rev. a) and a new (appropriate) driver now shows up
in my Device Driver dialogue. However, it has a little yellow exclamation
point beside it (indicating that Win95 feels there is still a problem,
although if there is, It is not apparent to  me...). The "properties" button
STILL does not give me any response whatsoever, it just sits there as if I
never pressed it.

So, in the final analysis, I don;t know if there is a remaining problem, and
if so, what to do about it. On the other hand, the new drive seems to work
just fine, so I think I will just assume everything is OK.

Thanks again to one and all for your help.

Cheers,

Michael

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