I tried it on three different computers here at work. One of them, with a combination DVD/CD burner wouldn't even see the disk at all. The other two, with CD-only capabilities, worked like my home computer -- tried to read the final tracks but couldn't get a clean read, skipping and stuttering until finally failing completely.

Is this evidence that the problem lies with the "beyond boundaries" writing to the CD itself?

Hmmm... I have a cheap portable CD player kicking around the house somewhere that will probably play those tracks. Maybe I can take the headphone output from that, run it into the microphone input of my sound card and get Total Recorder to turn those "bad" tracks into MP3 files.

Or maybe just skip those tracks altogether. I can see it now -- the end of the audiobook, and the inspector is saying: "And, the murderer is [stutter crackle skip skip...]"

Oh, wait -- late breaking news flash. I tried the CD on the oldest, slowest computer we have, one with an ancient read-only CD player. It played the end tracks without problem. So... maybe I can take all nine of the CDs in question, copy the end tracks of each one onto the hard drive, move them across the network onto my computer, burn them onto a CD, take that CD home and add that CD to my ripping/encoding project.

Sigh... do I really want to listen to that audiobook that much?

tanstaafl.