Was MF4 Tested Before Release?

[cbhall]

Trying to get MF4 to perform to specification has been a nightmare. I purchased the upgrade license, coming from MF3.5 (OEM) which, in general, worked fine but did not have many features I wanted. Although MF3.5 was listed as a legitimate package to upgrade, I never got MF4 to install. Ulead's advice: De-install MF3.5 and then install the upgrade. This, of course doesn't work since it looks for an installed package to upgrade. The installation program crashes with the "can't read memory" error message generated by Windows.
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As I also have a copy of MF3.0 (which never quite seemed to work either), I de-installed MF3.5, installed MF3.0, then installed the upgrade MF4.0, then ed-installed MF3.0. This seemed to work. However, when I executed the program, I would get ridiculous error messages popping up (such as an empty message box with an exclaimation point or a message (You shouldn't see this). Redoing the entire installation process above and NOT de-installing MF3.0 kept the messages from popping up, but I was having trouble getting successful burns from the product. Removing InCD, Data-Add 2, and a Roxio driver that had been left behind by a Roxio de-install, and manually removing all references to Roxio, finally allowed me to de-install MF3.0 without getting error messages.
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Now ready to burn some DVDs. I wanted to be able to make DVD videos only audio to use the increased capacity of the DVD and use dolby digital audio. The program would not allow me to produce more than 99 tracks which I think is a DVD specification problem (I know it is on CD) on a DVD. The first problem was that the disk was never finished (fixed, finalized), nor did the program offer to finalize it, nor was there any obvious option to do so. The disk produced would skip around at random (NOT a random shuffle as it might do a stop and replay over and over again like a broken record.) Separately finalizing the disk solved that problem. Then I tried to write 99 tracks taking about 3.5 gigs. The program crashed with the "can't read memory" Windows error message.
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My first attempts to burn a 4.7 gig DVD failed, again with the "can't read memory" error message. As Nero told me that packet switching software caused problems for Nero, and in particular Roxio's, I de-installed all programs which use the Roxio burning engine (and there are many). It still did not work. I then removed InCD and Data-Add 2.0. The error message went away.
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But this was not the end of the problems. I then tried to burn a DL DVD using the Tweak and Fit program. Another error message of great use (Burn unsuccessful). I then tried the copy disk program. This seemed to work, but I can't play back the DVD as it freezes at the layer break.
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I then decided to try to figure out if the problem was the burning software or the rest of the bits. I went back to Tweak and Fit, and tried all options available other than writing to disk. When I tried to fit an entire disk (7.12 gigs) to 4.16 Gigs, it warned me that the result may be too large to burn. Result of writing the DVD structure to disk? It also freezes at where the layer break would have occurred if I had burned it to a DL DVD. When I did the same but to the full 8.5 gigs, it wrote to the hard drive without problems (so the problem of unsuccessful DL DVD burns must be burn software related.) When I deleted material from the 7.12 disk down to about 5.5 gigs, the tweek and fit program worked to produce a DVD structure on hard disk, but, unlike the documentation states I can, I cannot adjust the compression settings. (Also, 100% seems to mean both "no compression" and "full compression" so I don't really know what 90% means.) I have yet to retry to burn to disk.
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Nero does a good job in compression when required and writing to single layer DVD's. So I use it. Nero, however, seems to have the same problem writing to DL DVDs: There is a problem at the layer break. So ...
-What to do now?
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Hopefully some of this will help someone else. For my remaining problems, I would appreciate anyone with solutions giving me a post. I just can't afford many more DL blanks to test production software, even if some, if not all, of the problems are due to other programs I run on my computer.