RogueProtoKol: Although you may not be able to tell the difference, I most definately can. Granted, there are some songs where it probably doesn't make any real difference at all, but I definately can tell on many songs. As I noted before, lower bitrates are going to have the most noticable effect in high/low frequency degredation. Download "3 Doors Down - Kryptonite" at bitrates of 128 and 320, and listen to both carefully (headphones, if possible), and then tell me if you still can't tell a difference (I think this is a song where I recall it being particularily noticable).
Arby: I'm very impressed with your English, if by your comment you meant that it's a foreign language to you. Hell, I'm impressed with your english even if it's not a foreign language to you
(hehe, you used the word "acclimated"). I'm sorry to hear about your employment situation, and I hope everything turns out alright.
On the subject of 'normalization,' I don't think I explained myself properly. I was simply using "normalization" as a rough description of how the mp3 encoding process works, rather than the feature in Nero of averaging track volume levels. I simply meant that the original mp3 sound levles may be from [9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9] (on the sound frequency spectrum), and the mp3 encoding process brings it down to [7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7] for compression purposes.
As far as burning .ape files to an audio CD, I'm not sure what to tell you. As best I can determine, there's no immediate way to do it (so you'd have to convert the .ape to .wav, or whatever prior to burning the CD. I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to have them in one "Kazaa Lite 'Shared Folder', accessible for playing in winamp," though. I keep my .ape files in the same directory as my .ape files without problem.
Nice job diagnosing and fixing your Winamp/APE problem, and best of luck with getting all of this figured out.