When I built my last PC, I bought the then latest "state of the art" Yamaha CD writer, and it was a disaster. It crashed on about 50% of the CDs I wrote, and most of the rest wouldn't work in any music CD player.
Eventually Yamaha agreed there was a problem and "replaced" it with a yet newer model, which I gave away and bought a HP 9600i (the internal, SCSI one).
That works perfectly, provided I don't try to use rewriteable CDs for music.
I don't put labels on them; I just write on them with a thick marker pen (the same one I use for drawing tracklines on my laminated charts).
Have you tried using non-rewriteable CDs for music? Might be the cause.