[tWreCK51]

They do mention on the official FLAC website that encoding/decoding flac errors highlights bad RAM, overclocking and/or other hardware issues. Have you checked your RAM with memtest86 and run a HD diag scan? If not, then do a few passes with memtest and run a scan on your drives to exclude them as the source of your troubles.......

Although my problems could still be a hardware issue (unlikely but still possible) I'm leaning more and more towards the theory that the FLAC compression itself is very sensitive and prone to corruption & errors when in archival for a period of time and when performing tasks such as burning, copying etc. It may also be a fluke/bug hardware/software incompatibility behaviour appearing on some systems and not others. While strange & unusual it's not the first time something like this has happened. Perhaps this needs to be brought to the attention and investigated further by the FLAC developers...........