Welcome to WD forums Ivor .

Well I'm not surprised Siemens argued with you - 256mb of ram is supposed to be 'plenty enough' - System requirements Nero but you'll notice Nero asks for more memory when burning DVD's - 128 meg as opposed to 64 (if you'd looked at the requirements even recently you wouldn't see the distinction, as they didn't make it !) .. so yup your 'explain' sounds v. possible indeed, as something the install notes used to say but now don't was to make sure Nero was the only thing running.

I guess the way here to 'prove' whether this may be happening to Inspiron83 is to burn a 'small disk' & see if the error persists or not .

"illegal disk" errors though are generally what they imply & that's Nero 'not liking' the disk, generally Nero kicks a code too which pins matters a bit more exactly - a note of that from Inspiron83 may help us diagnose better .