I just wanted to post to agree and amplify your remarks about ripping in secure mode and disabling C2 and the caching option in EAC.
Ok, you get piss poor speeds compared normal settings but I believe quality is more important than speed.
An example of how long it can take is when I ripped a Madness CD I have here; it took over 4 hours. There are scratches all over the top & bottom of the disc but it plays perfectly on the empeg now (it didn't before). I also have other (apparently) flawless CDs that took a while to rip this way compared to more relaxed methods. Each time (and for no apparent reason) I noticed the error dot incrementing in EAC but in the end there were no errors logged by EAC for the final rip. Presumably through persistance it managed to correct them all - I'm not going back but I would assume these ripped with errors beforehand and I wasn't paying full attention.