Hi!

Thanks to everyone for their excellent tips. I was leaning toward a shorted
spindle motor, but the fact that the index was always read successfully made
me wonder if that was really the problem.

Cleaning the lens gave very little improvement and I did make sure it could
slide back and forth freely. I started in to disconnecting all the cabling
leading to the CD player mechanism and just as a guess, I reseated all of
the connectors before taking the whole thing out to deal with the spindle
motor. I couldn't see anything wrong with any of them, but the player is
working perfectly now. There is no hesitation to spin up now, and the
seeking seems to happen very quickly.

I have never seen a player made quite like this one. It seems that the
spindle motor servo controller is mounted to a circuit board that the
spindle motor is also soldered directly to.

William