Congrats on the conversion!

First, I want to make sure you know about EAC's queue feature... You can pop in a CD, rip that CD, then pop in CD #2 and start ripping it before CD #1 has finished compressing. I used to do this on my notebook and pop in CD after CD after CD. My system also compressed slower than it ripped. I ended up having 100's of wav's, waiting to be compressed in my queue. Here's the coolest part, if you close EAC while there is a queue, it will resume that queue the next time you start EAC! I used to rip at work on my notebook, shut it down, go home and resume my queue over night! The only limit was my hard drive space for all of those wav's.

If this doesn't help you, I have one other suggestion...

You can tell EAC to name the file in a way that will have all of the information in the filename. If you were to rip to WAV (and not mp3), you could later tell EAC to convert those WAV's to mp3 in one batch process. I recommend looking for a seperate program to do this because EAC adds "filename.compressed.mp3" for some odd reason. The last step would be to use a program like Tag&Rename to put the tags back in (because EAC doesn't store the tag info. if you only rip to WAV.

You brought up the 255 limit, so I'd rip them all to the same folder like this:
D:\mp3s\artist - year - album - genre - track number - song title.wav

If you need help setting this up, let me know.