Ripping scratched CDs: hangups

First of all, thanks to the authors of cdparanoia for building a great
utility.  

I've got a beef with cdparanoia.  It seems to hang when I rip a
scratched CD, even though said CD will play fine (to my ear) on the same
cdrom drive.  I've been using cdparanoia occasionally for 2 years on
different machines and all the combinations have had this problem.

When I say hang, what happens is the Rip indicator goes to 0.2x or less
and the drive spins endlessly.  I can abort the rip and encode OK,
although that used to freeze the entire system.

Here is my current setup:

HP ZD7280 laptop
Fedora Core 3 OS, with all updates as of this writing
cdparanoia-alpha9.8-24
grip-3.2.0-4

Thanks in advance.