You're welcome, Barbara, and best of luck. I suspect that the shop did
NOT fix the problem and I suspect that only a format & clean install of
Windows will. Good luck.
PA Bear,
I do appreciate your help and resources

I heard back from Microsoft
Customer Service, who suggested that I try to reinstall that patch. I
had already done that first thing this morning and IE 6 is working OK
with the patch, so possibly it was just a bad download, or confusion
with other patches done at the same time. I've also run a full chkdsk
this morning just to be sure the hard drive is OK.
Soapbox: The suggestion to format/clean install on my CD writing problem
is a bit like calling a plumber to fix a leaky faucet and being told to
tear down my house and rebuild it, hoping that will fix the problem. It
probably would but the cost is too great for me to consider.
That was exactly the suggestion the computer shop gave me after they
worked on my computer for a week. They could not figure out why Windows
lost the ability to directly write to the new DVD/CD-RW drive. Nor,
could it write to the old drive they had replaced, that had been working
fine for many years. Nero software was able to create a CD for me, so I
knew the drive itself was OK and I was able to send some pictures to a
friend of her daughter's memorial service (a sad story). That was after
I had already tried what I thought were all the fixes known to mankind.
(I've been in or around the computer business for most of my adult
life and currently manage a group of desktop support IT folks. I'm old
enough to have seen a lot of technology come and go in my 65 years).
It seems that many people around the world have encountered similar
issues with Windows XP forgetting how to write to a CD directly. I've
tried all the "fixes" suggested by Microsoft and others - to no avail,
as did the computer shop.
Other than that, my computer works just great. Rebuilding it from
scratch would cost me a lot of time, money and energy - probably 6
months to reload all my software and get it configured correctly. I
know because that's what it took last time I had a hard drive failure -
even with good backup tapes, it was long arduous process. Not my idea
of fun.
What would be really good customer service is for Microsoft to figure
out a way (or a quick program we could download) that could restore
whatever secret settings are needed to make CDs write directly, since
they are the experts at what is really needed inside the computer to
make that happen.
Climbing down off my soap box...

That's my story and I'm sticking
with it.
Again, I very much appreciate your suggestions about how to deal with
the IE 6 patch and the stern warning about the consequences of not
having the patch running

They were helpful and I was able to resolve
that issue by trying it again. I have rarely had issues with a regular
patch. I do record (on paper) all changes made to my computer so that
if/when things do go wrong, I can usually backtrack and undo until I
find the culprit. Thanks again
Barbara