I found that pausing with my machine messed things up royally, up until I changed my pausing habits. Once I hit a button (such as pause) and let it sit for a few seconds, then did my cueing *carefully* (no sudden back-and-forth moves), then paused, waited a few seconds, hit "copy" to bring up the menu, waited a few more seconds, then hit "copy" again to confirm -- *then* I had a pretty decent success rate.
I like to put a week's worth of shows onto one disc with SP quality, so I don't have any choice but to skip the commercials.