First, thanks to all for your suggestions.  I've gotten slighty farther with 
fixing this problem with my AIT-2 Tape Drive.  After a few changes, I am able 
to restore a lot more files before amrestore crashes.

Here's what I did:

1) Power off tape changer & system
2) Change dip switches on the AIT-2 tape drive so that 7-off & 8-on.
        This essentially turns off hardware commpression & turns on software 
compression
3) reboot the system.

Before I try anymore tests, I'm going to re-run amtapetype again, and then run 
a few backups withthe new config.

-Rob