The disclaimer is given on Download Page | Important Additional Information | InCD Update information page:
http://www.nero.com/en/content/c1003822797030.html
Ahead's disclaimer may also be read as follows: If you are unlucky with InCD 3.x, and you have a new recorder, then try InCD 4.0.1.0.
Well, all of us would prefer if software companies released only fully tested versions of their products. This, however, is not realistic nowadays, due to market pressures, etc. Hence, although I'm not too happy about the beta smell, I appreciate that Ahead is at least honest about the current state of InCD, and I hope that Ahead will react quickly to users' feedback.
In the longer run, the new version of InCD might still be useful on pre-XP versions of Windows.
As for XP, we may hope that SP2 provides MRW support. But will we be happy if MS gets this support from Roxio, and are we sure that Roxio can provide better software than Ahead?
Concerning Roxio, for a long time many users of DirectCD had complained about file timestamps not being preserved while copying, and this bug was fixed in the latest release of DirectCD. Since InCD 4.0.1.0 seems to suffer from a similar bug (see below), it will be instructive to see how quickly Ahead fixes this bug.
Here is a quick outline of my latest experiments on my XP Pro SP1 box with Lite-On LTR-48125W VS0D.
After removing InCD 3.52.40 and EasyWriteReader 1.0, I installed InCD 4.0.1.0, formatted a blank disc (Datex 10x) to MRW, and copied to it 5036 files (394 MB) from a disc formatted to non-MRW by InCD 3.52.40, mounted on my DVD-ROM drive. The files were copied correctly (as confirmed via FileSync's binary compare), but 2379 copied files got the current date and time instead of their original timestamps.
Further, both copying and reading (for binary comparisons) seemed to take much longer than for previous versions of InCD. I can't give precise comparisons, since I don't have data for previous versions with the same firmware and CD-RW media.
Finally, Task Manager shows that incdsrv.exe takes 4,512 KB of memory, whereas InCD.exe takes 16,584 KB, i.e., about 21 MB in total. If I recall correctly, this used to be about 3.5 MB for the previous versions.
Of course, my results may be peculiar, but I'd like to advise other users to check timestamps, reading/writing speeds, and memory consumption.