Actually I have had problems with the cassette too tightly bound.
I got a new cassette via UPS and it must have been dropped along the way. It looked fine, but when I went to mount it, the screws were so tight that they held it at a bit of an angle... which did not flatten out as I locked it in. (I thought it would just flatten). I tried to ride it like this and it was NFG. I called a friend and he said, "just take the screws out... they don't matter." To my surprise, that was the perfect solution. The cassette just slipped right on and everything sat flat and worked fine.
I was helping my son the other day and after we removed the cassette to remove the dummy disk, one of the screws fell out of the cassette. I told him no problem, you don't need 'em anyway. And sure enough, no problem.