Problems Burning Disks after OS Update

Question

I've been working on a photo project with tens of thousands of image files. As I've been working through this project, I've been burning pictures to CD-ROMs. I'm using standard 700 MB CD-R disks, and until now I've been able to fit about 3,500-4,000 files on each disk, or a total size of about 640-660 MB. I've burned ten CD-ROMs this way in the past year.
Last night I was prompted for an automatic update from OS 10.4.9 to OS 10.4.10, which I did. After the computer updated and restarted, something automatically launched itself from the dock, gave the following unusual message which immediately aroused my suspicion: UPDATING HL-DT-ST DVDRW 6 WA 4080 MA TO BE39 ...
This was as far as I was able to copy before the process finished and the screen disappeared. Another part of the message said not to interrupt the installation or else I could end up with a non-functioning device.
Then the computer restarted itself. A second time the application started itself from the dock but said there weren't any drivers needing updating.
This is the first time in 13.5 years of using Macs that I've ever had to update a driver, and I was very suspicious since it did it all automatically without my authorization.
I restarted the computer again, and the application launched a third time, so I hunted it down and deleted it. It was some sort of driver utility (I wish I'd written down its name). After this, everything seemed to work fine until I went to burn a CD last night.
First, the finder looked slightly different, with new buttons and layout specific to burning a CD. Second, the disk appeared on the desktop with the extension .fbpf, though it had never had an extension before. Third, when I dragged the files to be copied into the Finder window, it just created shortcuts instead of copying the files. I had to do a command-c and a command-v to get them in there. Not all of the files would show up in the finder window, but if I did a command-v again it would ask if I wanted to overwrite them. Fourth, I had 640 MB of files, but it said there wasn't enough room, that the files to be copied were larger than the disk.
Eventually I removed files until it said there was enough room, so I burned the disk. The first attempt produced a disk with half the files missing. The second attempt produced a disk with only 2,007 files and a total size of 399.8 MB. This was wasting about 40% of space on the CD. When I looked at the CD, however, it appeared that the burn had gone nearly to the edge of the disk, instead of about 60% of the way, so something is filling up that space it seems. But what?
My immediate suspicion was the driver update related to the OS update, so I did some researched and realized that OS 10.4.10 is causing tons of problems for lots of people, so I decided to revert to OS 10.4.9.
I performed an archive install back to OS 10.4.8, got rid of the old system folder, and downloaded the update to 10.4.9. Disk Utility returned no errors. I finished that this morning, but the disk burning problem remains, and the Finder even froze up during this process.
My guess is that reverting to a previous OS did not fix whatever changes were made to the driver, but I'm not sure how I should proceed here. I'm also wondering if this is more generally related to OS 10.4, because I cannot recall burning a data CD like this since I upgraded from OS 10.3 (but backing up purchased audio files from iTunes was the same as always).
Does anyone have any suggestions here? (I'd prefer not to have to reformat the drive and restore everything from back-up and original install disks because that takes about six hours.)
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.9)
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Thanks Carolym for your response.
Go to System Preferences/Accounts/Login Items. Delete any
applications you have listed.
I did this; there were four applications including the driver update software that self-installed last night. Who knew it was still lurking around after being deleted?
But, after restarting, the problem persists.
Is this a SuperDrive that can also burn to DVD? If
so, read here; http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/
superdrivefw_update2.1.html
Yes, it is.
This page didn't make any sense to me. Were these posts by people installing the update or removing it? That page seems to refer to the update that happened last night, which seems to have started my problems. Can you elaborate on this?
I've replicated this on both my internal drive and an external drive connected by FireWire. I've never had problems with this media before. The alsoft.com site is apparently off-line today.
The entire problem seems to be software related. The size discrepancy between what's reported by the "Burn Disk" Finder window is now TWICE the size reported on the "Get Info" window. It's as if it is reading the contents to be burned twice when calculating their size.
The files I want to put on a disk are 640.5 MB. Everything on my computer says this, except the Finder window for the disk. At the bottom of the window it reports the files are over 1,291 MB in size, which is too large to fit on the 700 MB disk. But when I select the files in that same finder window with command-i, it says 640.5 MB.
For kicks, I put the disk I burned last night through Disk Utility. It showed the 400.5 MB of files on the 700 MB Disk. So, there was about 260 MB of space wasted on that disk. When I burned the disk last night, the computer was thinking the files were about 660 MB (which is the most it has ever allowed me to write to a disk). Disk Utility also said the disk was burned in Mac format, and I was under the impression this computer was burning to ISO format.
Is there some setting somewhere that perhaps I'm overlooking that writes the disks a certain way and that could be the cause? Could it be a memory issue/allocation/buffer size/etc issue? Something else?
MacBook   Mac OS X (10.4.9)