Ok, I've tried Nero and other utilities for burning CD/DVD media from ISO files, as well as creating ISO files. While Nero works fine, 99.9% of the time (others less so), I've been using a free CD/DVD burning tool called ImgBurn. It can be downloaded from http://www.imgburn.com. There's a full write up on the web site about what you can do with it. All I can say is, "It hasn't made a single coaster yet!!" And that's good enough for me.
From the author's web site:
ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!
It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:
- Read - Read a disc to an image file
- Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
- Write - Write an image file to a disc
- Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
- Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing
Enjoy!!