Audio playback & Importing problem on Vista

Hi all,

I'm chasing a problem which is causing us some grief here & hoping someone
has some solutions as hours spent searching has revealed nothing that has
cured the issue - audio playback & 'ripping' from an audio CD. The OS is
Vista Business on a notebook, the hardware (i.e. DVD burner) is fine as
software CDs load & copy without issue, plus utilising one of the free
'ripping' apps we downloaded works fine & both Windows Media Player (11) plus
Apple's iTunes both play the files imported from the free ripping app
successfully.

I believe the issue is embedded somewhere in the OS, but at the moment it's
causing us a headache as the user needs to load audio files from company
training CDs. Neither Windows Media Player, nor iTunes will import properly.
WMP simply skips each file with the notation 'Error' in the column beside the
track name, while iTunes starts to grab about 1 second of each track, then
moves down the track listing.

The CDs concerned are not burned - they are commercially printed from glass
masters & they are not copy protected. I have also tested a couple of my own
audio CDs (both predating copy protection) with the same result.

Has anyone any ideas on what we can look at to solve this issue? The only
minor difference I have been able to effect is that we reset the default CD
handler back to WMP & then back to iTunes - prior to doing this, iTunes would
have the same problem as WMP, but did not generate an error, just skip the
track.

Any assistance greatly appreciated.