Malfunctioning HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GMA-4020B Drive

I am a newbie - to both this forum and CD-DVD technology so I apologize in advance for any supid questions. I'm running an IBM Netvista PC 1Gz - 784MB RAM. I just replaced the stock CD burner with a multi CD/DVD burner mentioned above. It seemed to work fine at first - i had to download a codec to get it to play DVDs. So far so good. Then I tried buring CDs (adding to some I already had and formatiing others from scratch). That's when the fun began. What a nightmare. I am getting every error one can imagine. Nothing consistent. Now the CDs won't format - when I try to format or copy to a CD - the CD writer fails on the last step. I've tried different speeds and different media (that work on other XP machines) - the latest is that my Roxio Creator 7 won't even acknowledge that the drive exists. (Says no recorder available). I'm about ready to pull it and put back my simple CD burner but I thought I would try for some advice first. I did not get any software with the drive - installed it without additional drivers. Could this be the problem? Is Roxio CD Creator 7 compatible with this drive? Can I get updated firmware anywhere. I'm really grasping at straws at this point but I appreciate any ideas or advice.
Pericles

Well what kinda burner do you have ? Also they do have inexpensive DL burner now so why are you just buying CD/DVD multi - not sure what you mean by that does that include DL function? What is your O/S and what kinda codec you download? What program are you doing the codec for? I start there...

Well I had a CD (only) burner that came with the machine. The ne CD-DVD multi drive was cheap so I figured I would upgrade. (I'm not sure what you mean when you say DL burner?) In order to play DVDs I had to download a codec, Cineplayer. It worked with Windows Media Player as I successfully played some DVD movies. - I upgraded my burner because a) I thought I might do better backing up my data to DVDs, b) it would be nice to be able to play DVDs and c) I am a glutton for punishment. I am running XP - SP2. Since my original post I re-installed my original CD burner and my existing software (CD Media Creator 7) does not recognize the original CD burner-recorder either - so now I installed the multi drive again and I'm committed to making it work. I ordered the latest version of RecordNow in the hopes that the more up-to-date software will recognize this drive and perhaps solve my problems. The new drive is an Hitachi DVDRAM GMA drive. Thanks for taking a moment to respond.
Pericles