Oddly enough, while you were posting this I was making a bunch of data discs (backups) using some ancient DVD-Rs I had laying around, since my DVD+Rs were not verifying (Verbatim 16x!) and they worked (almost) perfectly! Just one that didn't verify out of 5 I think.If your verifications are failing after disabling Anydvd, then it's possible that you are producing bad burns.
These were old 1x DVD-Rs (!) so took forever to burn & verify, but by golly they worked.
I have gone back & forth on burn speeds--I was using 1/2x for a while and then when I had problems reverted to Auto which seemed to work better. Bottom line: I think my RecordNow7.3 might have a funky pxengine and I'm going to try to wean myself off of it in favor of ImgBurn. I liked that RN73 auto-everythinged, will have to learn which ImgBurn burn modes to use for various scenarios (DVD movies vs big mpgs or xvids vs data discs vs Image backups).
Anyway thanks WS for your attention and ideas--I appreciate it!