I don't use either of those versions of lame. I use the command line version of lame which is obtainable from my website right now: http://www.bstage.com/Lame/ and you can find it with some digging (also the very latest version) at the official Lame website: http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/

Then I use audiograbber ($25) that will let me specify the lame command line tool as an external encoder and I can configure audiograbber to rip the WAV's and then delete them after encoding them with the external encoder. It has a lot of other handy options as well. EAC is *supposed* to be the most rock solid accurate CD ripper out there right now, but I have had no problems with audiograbber, probably because I have a good CDROM drive, and its WAY fast. It rips an entire CD in about a minute prior to encoding to MP3.

Audiograbber also encapsulates the CDDB information into the WAV file and knows to stuff it into the MP3 (or Lame does) so that the ID3 info is prefilled out completely ahead of time. I love this combination.

good luck, glad to hear you're getting better results..

-steve