The metal separator plates in your CD changer are raised up and down by brass screws. The screws are turned by small plastic gears. These plastic gears are held in place by metal tabs with two screws on ONE end only. When there is too much resistance (e.g., two CDs in one slot - especially at the top or bottom of the stack - #1 or #6 positions) the metal tabs holding the gears in place can flex allowing the small driven gears to rise above the large drive gear that turns them. When this happens you'll hear the crunching noise of teeth being skipped. I guess if ALL of the small gears did this to the same degree and skipped the same number of teeth on the drive gear it would be OK since the changer seems to run through an "I gotta find out where everything is and calibrate myself" routine everytime you key the ignition BUT what usually happens is one gear skips and the others stay meshed - so the platters get out of kilter. That's when CDs start hanging and getting scratched and if it's bad enough for some reason they skip or sometimes won't play at all. I never did figure that one out because it seems if the platters were working well enough to deliver the CD to the laser, the CD would play. How would the player section know everything above and below it is kapakahi?

Anyway, you can take the changer apart and fix it but it takes a while to get everything in synch again. But the more you use it, the looser it gets and the more easily it gets whacked out. Believe me, you will get tired of taking it apart, spinning the gears to get it lined up and putting it all back together. I finally replaced the OEM head unit with a Sony CD player that has a USB port and yanked out the POS CD changer and put it a Ford Taurus cup/coin holder. A ten dollar flash drive holds WAY more music than the changer ever did and there are no moving parts. It won't play DRM protected files but I get around that by using a first gen iPod Shuffle. Cheap on eBay! Plug it into the USB port and run its output to the auxillary in which is a standard 3.5mm stereo jack like you see on headphones - then you have the option of reading straight off the iPod via USB or if you want to play a DRM file, switch to AUX and play it with the iPod. I don't have many DRM files though so mostly use a 2GB micro SD card loaded with wmas. That way I can play them in the VX and also with my cell phone when I'm out of the VX. It's funny how a sliver of silicon smaller than my fingernail has replaced a whole stack of CDs, which a few years ago replaced ten times their weight in vinyl. Wonder what will be next? If it gets much smaller I'll need tweezers! Now where have I heard that phrase before....? Anyway... dragging and dropping files is so much quicker and easier than burning CDs too. Wish I'd made the swap years ago but for some reason I wanted to keep the VX "original". The hell with that. Your CD changer is going to give you nothing but trouble from here on out so my advice is to yank that cassette playing, CD jamming system out of there and replace it with a big fuzzy hole and a single CD head unit that has a USB port and a 3.5mm auxilliary port so you can play files instead of CDs. I guarantee you will not regret it! C'mon, tell me - when's the last time you played a cassette...? ;>