only a few days ago I installed the latest Pioneer 109 16x dual layer all format recorder in an external firewire/usb2 box and that worked fine with Jukebox...

With your problems why not forget Jukebox for ripping and just try a good free ripper like audiograbber to get waves on the pc and then just import the waves into Jukebox for SD transfer?
http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/