Thanks for the reply. Actually, I hadn't noticed any sound quality problems with rips from WMP 7.1. When I tested, both WMP 7.1 and SoundStream were set to rip files to 160Kbps (setting under the Tools/Options/CD Music)
EZCD 5 has a lot of nice features, but wasn't fully tested under Win2000. There are (known) problems creating data CD's under Win2000 that don't occur under Win98/Me.