I have a Pioneer 106 rewriter and a Pacific 1002 DVD player. I use recordnow max to copy original dvd's, smart ripper-dvd2one-nero 6 to copy larger original dvd's, and ulead movie factory to burn avi's to dvd. When doing a DVD for the first time I always prefer to use a rewritable to test it. I have found that the Pacific will play the rewritable without problem the first few times they are written but then gets the usual sticking and skipping problems. What is worse is that after about 6 times the rewritables become unusable, all of the burning programs refuse to erase them and insist they are not rewritable discs. The discs I am using are Datasafe 2X with a green and black label and are actually made by Princo. Anybody else had a similar problem and are the rewritables really unusable after about 6 uses?

princo rw's are awful i bought a batch of 10- first one was actually ok- i managed to erase a few in record now max when nero refused to erase them, in the end i got some 1x verbatims which are much much more compatible but 1x burning is very slow, and each disc was like £2.90!!!.

Depending on what you are burning i would suggest not bothering with rw's- use power dvd to open the main ifo of your created video_ts folder (before burning it). if everything is fine then you can burn it if it plays in power dvd then there isn't a problem in the converison/ripping process.

I still use them for testing on my xbox, and for data back up

Yup my Princo DVD-RW fell apart after less than 10 burns. See if you can't get ahold of a better quality disc (i.e. Verbatim or Fujifilm) and it should be good for more burns. I have given up on the RW formats myself. I get tired of waiting around to burn an RW at 1x just to find out that it fails right before it gets to the end. As mentioned by nimbles there are ways that you can view your project before even burning it to disc so it would be faster and easier to use that then going the RW route.

actually just been to the blank disc shop website and they are doing the pioneer 2x dvd-rw's on there-first time i've seen them- i hear they are the ones when you get the a05/a06 retail pack.

got a couple of them but they are £4 a disc!!!!!

Your DVD player support DVD+RW according to DVDRhelp's list (http://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers.php?DVDnameid=2184&Search=Search&#comments) so trash those Princo DVD-RWs and get some 2.4x DVD+RWs made by Ricoh/Ritek instead. They are reliable, burn in 22-24 min and are not very expensive.
For example Memorex for £1.49 @blankdiscshop or if you need many 25 pack Arita for £37.25 (£1.29 ea) @bigpockets.