In my own defense, I'm not THAT dumb. I mean, I'm not rocket scientist either, but no... I was not trying to save TO the cd. I was saving my project on my hard drive using images and models from the cd. I have been experimenting a lot today with models that are actually saved ON my hard drive and I have not experienced any save issues. Aparently it's the disk - unless it's spinning constantly in the cd drive, when the drive rests, your project is not reading the disk and when you save it, the cd data doesn't go with it.
Or something like that, is my guess.
It does hinder working through the tutorials, but not so much that I can't figure them out.
Thanks for your willingness to help guys. This program is killer!
PS. I just watched the online "Duel" video. My sincere respect and admiration goes out to the dude(s) who put that together.