DVD Burning Oddity

My husband and I recently purchased a spindle of 50 Mitsubishi PC DVD data discs. We've purchased this particular brand on several occasions in the past including another spindle and have not had any difficulties with them.

With the most recent batch though, I've had the strangest experience. When I first tried burning some discs, I got errors when attaching my external DVD burner to both my PC and Mac (both of which I'd burned successfully from before). I thought the discs had been changed and were now incompatible with my DVD burner so I had my husband try to burn a disc on his notebook. His first burn was successful but the second one failed with a similar problem as my other two computers.

The only difference between his first burn and second (and my burn attempts) was in how the disc was named. On his first burn, the disc was titled with an automatically generated number rather than a name. Before someone says I may have used an illegal character in my naming, I'll mention that I'm well aware of issues you can have when using things like "?", ":", ";", etc. In fact, on each of my attempts, I named the disc differently and only used letters of the alphabet (in one case, just a simple name) and the character "-". So, I can state emphatically that the failures weren't due to illegal characters.

Since that first successful burn, I have gone back to my Mac and used the external burner to make multiple discs named with the same sequence of numbers as the first successful disc. Lo and behold, every disc thus named regardless of content has been a success. It's a little annoying to have to name the discs in such a manner but it's better than tossing out a large stack of new DVD-Rs.

This situation has me pretty stumped. I've never known a disc to succeed only with a sequence of numbers as its name. If anyone can clue me in as to why this might be happening, I'd be grateful as I'm very curious about the cause.