As suggested by Alec, I carried out a test on the Panasonic Audio Recorder, to determine whether preloading a blank file, before recording, made any difference to the distortion problem, which I experience, on one of my PCs. (The dreaded Go Back was not installed on this PC and a Defrag operation was carried out overnight)
I recorded a blank 2 minute file, stopped the recorder and then without saving, started another recording. However, a window then appeared asking if the Untitled recording should be saved and if No is chosen, then the recorder just seems to discard the original file and start recording from scratch. If this second recording is played back, the slight distortion which I observed earlier, is still present in the form of break-up, so no difference there I also noticed that the hard disc activity was still greater than when using the Windows Sound Recorder.
If I save the silent file and then load it back into the recorder then select Record, the result is just the same. So it would seem that it is not possible to reserve disc space, by preloading a blank file.

I tried Tony's method of extending the Windows Sound Recorder recording time and it does work OK. However, if you use this method, every time you start the recorder from scratch, you will have to let it run for a period, before you can use the 'Decrease Speed' function, under the 'Effects' option, since the default length at start up is 0.00seconds. Furthermore, on start up, the recording format defaults to 22.050Hz, 8 Bit, Mono which is not very suitable for transfer of KN7000 sound to CD. So, you have to reconfigure the format when you first start the recorder.
If you use the way I suggested in the above post, then everything is initialised automatically, using the desktop shortcuts and one mouse double click. I realise that it takes a bit of setting up initially, but you only do it once!

One point which I mentioned in my earlier response to Alec - if your recording takes less time than the pre-loaded Blankxx.wav file, this will leave some silent space at the end of your recording. If you just save the entire recording to disc, then the silent space will also be saved, making the file unnecessarily long. The way round this is to select 'Edit' and then click on the 'Delete After Current Position' option. Make sure that the Current Cursor position is at the end of your recording. A slightly unfortunate side effect of this procedure, is that it resets the maximum recording length, to that of the file which you have just 'chopped' . Not a big problem - just close the recorder window and open it again using the shortcut, if you wish to do another recording.

------------------
Willum