Hey there everyone,

I am wondering if anyone would be able to help me out with this issue, as it's a bit odd and I can't seem to figure it out.

A few months ago I decided to give dBpoweramp a try (because I was tired of setting up EAC) to rip some CD's.
I opted to install the trial and it worked fine. However, I didn't have many CD's, so I left it alone after that and went about my business.

Fast forward to now, and I have a bunch of new CD's that just came in that I want to rip.
Of course, my trial has expired, but it worked well, and the metadata databases actually had some info for my CD's which surprised me, so I went ahead and purchased Reference 14.4. It worked before, so why wouldn't it work now?

Well, apparently, something has changed, and I can't figure out what it is.
First, I may have foolishly attempted to preserve the settings by installing the newly purchased version over the trial.
This resulted in the program hanging as soon as I inserted a CD. I decided to do a fresh install after this, so I uninstalled the program, rebooted, installed the new version, and rebooted again.

Now it doesn't hang immediately upon loading a CD, and I even made it through the Accuraterip offset configuration successfully.
However, when I try to rip (even set to Burst mode) it won't do anything. It stays at trying to rip track 1 for over 20 minutes before I ran out of patience.
The program stops being responsive (forever stalled at "Canceling" the rip) and I have to end its task. While there, I notice that many instances of "GetPopupinfo.exe" and "conhost.exe" are being loaded and closed repeatedly. Not sure if this would help identify the problem.

Anyway, I tried again with the same results (Burst or Secure rip.) I then tried simply loading the CD and hitting play through the CD ripper - same result, program hangs and no audio is played.
I can queue and play the CD perfectly fine in foobar, however.

I'm not entirely sure what is going on, but this is quite frustrating as I'm not sure what exactly is going on, so I can't fix it.

For what it's worth, I did try changing some options beforehand under the Secure Ripping section, and the program's auto-detection for read caching seemed to say my drive didn't support it, so it changed the read cache from the default of 1024kb to zero.

My drive is a Samsung SH-S203B, PC running Win7 x64.

Any ideas?
Thank you.