Mystery solved!!! When I bought my previous desktop, 6 or 7 years ago, the salesman gave me a pack of 50 unbranded, blank, DVD-R disks.  I don't burn many disks, so I still had half of them left, and I didn't have a problem with them in my old desktop.  I've been having trouble trying to burn any DVDs on my new i660.  Just for grins, I tried to burn a DVD on my Dell Voestro 1500 laptop.  It appeared to be working, using Nero 7, but I got nothing buy errors during the burn verify.  I tried several more disks, and non of them would work.  I just got back from buying a pack of new Kodak DVD-R disks.  I was able to burn the first one I tried,  then, just to see what would happen, I started up the Dell Backup And Recovery program, and I got the Start button.  I wasn't grayed out.  I didn't bother burning, since I already have it on an SD, but it looks like that was the problem.
I tried following these steps from the manual: To create system recovery media1. Launch Dell Backup and Recovery.2. Click the Recovery Media tile.3. Select USB Flash Drive or Discs, and then click Continue.4. Follow the instructions on the screen. I got to step 2, and saw a clock with spinning hands. After a couple of minutes, it showed that there was about 8GB of data, showed me that my optical drive was selected, told me to insert a blank disk, and click START. START was grayed out.  I waited a while, but it stayed grayed out. I thought I'd try again, so I clicked cancel.  The clock started spinning again, but the file size never changed from 0. I canceled again, and started completely from the beginning at step 1 above. Now all I have is a spinning clock that's been spinning for 20 minutes.  I just stopped it with the task manager. What now? 
Having trouble creating a recovery disk