Route 66: Season 3, Volume 1 was released 07/21/09.  I have been unable to find it locally, but I was heartened to see that Best Buy had Route 66: Complete Third Season in stock for $39.99 (as I recall).  I bought it and took it with me this past weekend for something to do to kill time while I was without of Internet access.  I decided to watch just the credits (so I could profile them) and then watch the individual episodes that looked interesting.  This set is apparently made up of a combination of Volume 1 and Volume 2 of Season 3 -- much as the Complete Second Season was marketed.

I had no trouble with the Volume 1 discs, but I could not load ANY of the 4 Volume 2 discs.  I tried two different DVD players with no success on either.  The newer DVD player was a brand-new one that supposedly will read all manner of DVDs.  On this machine, instead of getting a DVD menu I got a folder tree -- like I would expect to see if I opened the disc in Windows Explorer.  There was nothing I could do to get the whole DVD to play.  When I got home from my trip, I tried to watch them on my regular DVD player, but it wouldn't read the Volume 2 discs, either. So, I'll have to take them back to Best Buy.  I don't know whether I should ask for a replacement or a refund since there's a good chance that if one box on the shelf was defective, the next could be, too.

If anyone has had a similar experience with this set, please share them.

Thanx, Skip.  I don't visit the TV Shows on DVD website as often as I should.  I think I'll return the DVD (and take a copy of that press release with me) and wait until I see that the "corrected" DVDs are available.

I wish I had seen the announcement, though.

BTW:  The first volume shows are pretty good.  Many of them are the ones without George Maharis -- it is in the volume 2 episodes where Glenn Corbett replaced Maharis.

Update to my story:

Thanks to Skip's posting, I printed out the Recall Announcement at TV Shows on DVD.  When I returned the Route 66 DVDs, the clerk first said I could only exchange them or get a store credit because I'd opened the shrink wrap.  But after she read the thing from TV Shows on DVD which included the UPC for the recalled discs, she gave me a refund with no othere questions asked.

While I almost always open all my DVD purchases as soon as I get them, I am not so quick to put them either into the DVD player or the Computer DVD drive.  My computer at home is still packed in boxes since I moved a couple months ago (I'm too lazy to make room for it in the new apartment and am using my workstation here at work to do Internet stuff) so I can't input my new purchases into Profiler at the moment.

But, I have that mountain of movies and TV shows I've never played yet -- many are in boxes and not readily available (someone helped me pack and we didn't label things all that clearly -- and many boxes went into storage that contained DVDs.  But so far, I have only had one or two DVDs that didn't work when I tried them.  While my PC is out of commission, though, I'm trying to watch everything NEW I buy so I should be able to catch the defective DVDs soon enough to return them like I did Route 66.

Maybe we need a thread in one of these forums where people can post "troublesome" DVDs so we can find about them without having to go to another website.  I find it hard enough to keep up with these forums and the one or two others I frequent without having to add another site.

Thanks for the update.  I'll keep an eye out, too.