So - Benq and Lite On are the same company, yes ? ... or one is the conglomerate of the other ??

Well - their inner parts in the dvd drives are nearly the same. The big exception being the Logic board.

OK - the Benq has a spindle motor with 3 wires (guessing two positive feeds of DC voltage and one common)

Now the Lite On has nearly the same spindle motor. It uses a flat cable ribbon. Looks to be a 4 wire run. Does this motor use all 4 leads? Or is one un-used - sort of a false lead.?

And how to go about changing these motors from Benq to Lite On - and vice verse ?

Soldering is not a problem for me. Lots of experience. So changing wires and ribbons - not a problem

Hey, I did look at this and do some research, but came up sort of empty handed =/

I don't know much about motors or anything at all, but my only idea would be that the benq has two positives and a shared ground, while the liteon has 2 positives and two separate grounds for each direction the motor can spin (clockwise and counter-clockwise).

Sort of how microsoft transitioned from the 4 pin fan to the 3 pin, and the only difference is that the two fans share a ground in the 3 pin and had separate grounds in the 4 pin.

Like I said, I am still fairly new to things like this. I did read in many places that people DID successfully swap spindles between these two drives, but no one enlightened on how they actually did it. And I could not find a pinout of either of the drive pcbs.

EDIT: You could always use a multimeter to check the voltages of all the pins couldn't you? Maybe use an old liteon spindle ribbon cable and cut it so you could test the traces on it.