burning of dvds fails with I/O error before burning even starts

i've got a cd/dvd burner here and recently, burning of dvds stopped working.  
i go through stints of burning a bunch of disks and then not using the drive, 
so i cant really pin point when it started.  burning cds works just fine.  
burning dvds though fails pretty much instantly before anything is written to 
the disc ... after such a failure, i can take the disc and burn it in a 
different machine without problems.

from googling around, the error is obviously pretty generic and most people 
hit I/O errors further along (due to buffer underruns or some such thing).  
any pointers would be great :/

System
-----------------------
K3b Version: 1.0.4

KDE Version: 3.5.8
QT Version:  3.3.8
Kernel:      2.6.23.14
Devices
-----------------------
HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GWA-4165B C006 (/dev/hda, ) [CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, 
DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD+R DL] [DVD-ROM, DVD-R Sequential, DVD-RW 
Restricted Overwrite, DVD-RW Sequential, DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD+R Dual Layer, 
CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW] [SAO, TAO, RAW, SAO/R96P, SAO/R96R, RAW/R16, RAW/R96P, 
RAW/R96R, Restricted Overwrite]

Burned media
-----------------------
DVD-R Sequential

Used versions
-----------------------
growisofs: 7.0

growisofs
-----------------------
Executing 'builtin_dd if=/dev/fd/0 of=/dev/hda obs=32k seek=0'
:-( failed to create thread: Input/output error

growisofs command:
-----------------------
/usr/bin/growisofs -Z /dev/hda=/dev/fd/0 -use-the-force-luke=notray -use-the-force-luke=tty -use-the-force-luke=tracksize:2285828 -dvd-compat -speed=8 -use-the-force-luke=bufsize:32m 
-mike

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