Since I decided to put an end to all the PCs at home after a set of hassles, I went out and got a Plextor PX-708UF:
No drivers. No configuration whatsoever. No hassle.
Burning the little movie I edited to commemorate our wireless LAN service onto a DVD was only slightly more complicated, since Toast had to re-encode the DV stream. It took me all of 15 minutes on my 700MHz iMac, mostly spent doing other stuff while it re-encoded and burned (it took me two hours to get it straight on my Windows box the first time around, and I couldn't do anything else with the computer).