H&R Block's "TaxCut" Software: Reconsider Using it with Removable CD-R Media

Prefatory note: Don't let my below "Foreword" discussing a (temporarily) frustrating "CD-R snafu" unduly scare you away from trying "TaxCut." It's entirely possible I would've experienced the identical, sporadic, "CD-R drive" problem if I'd instead been using the competing "TurboTax" product.

Foreword (feel free to skip ahead):

Not only this year but also for the past few years, I've used H&R Block's "TaxCut" software to "do" my federal and state income tax returns. I'd likewise used TaxCut's chief competitor, TurboTax, once or twice several years ago. Perhaps I felt that TurboTax, which generally costs about five dollars more than TaxCut, contained still more "bells and whistles" (e.g., its multimedia "movies" about general topics are somewhat larger and flashier) than does TaxCut. But, frankly, I myself had never gotten any significant use out of viewing those "nice-but-superfluous" (eminently skippable) movies; and I didn't feel that any of the other modest enhancements (that TurboTax provided but which TaxCut didn't) had given me sufficient reason to pay five bucks extra for TurboTax.

Consequently, as of a few years ago, I'd become one of TaxCut's repeat customers. And I'd never had any problems whatsoever using TaxCut until this year (spring 2008). For reasons still not entirely clear to me, this year's edition of "TaxCut Premium Federal and State" gave me major headaches whenever I "saved" my tax return (not to the hard drive but instead) to a removable, rewritable CD-R disc and subsequently attempted to retrieve that "successfully saved" file. Last year (as well as the year before that), I'd had absolutely NO trouble using the "2006" (or earlier) edition(s) of TaxCut to save my tax returns onto the very same media and then subsequently retrieve them. But this year--regardless of which of my desktop PC's two CD drives I tried using--some of the time Taxcut would display the following onscreen, popup error message:

"The return you have selected cannot be loaded due to the following errot: File Header Block not located. Not a Taxcut data file. You should update the program and try and again...."