One thing that might work is to update your drive's firmware. Do this by going to the manufacturer's web site and searching for your drive and download the firmware software. I had problems with my drive at one time and putting the latest firmware solved all my problems when all else failed.

lol...just tried to update firmware on drive as suggested...drive is Hitachi-LG...used AIDA32 to find info and attempted to use product info for drive and it was a dead link....did search for drive itself and on LG's website they don't offer support for CD-RW drive anymore, just DVD-RW...contacted computer manufacturer and of course they're no help what-so-ever as usual...seems since my comp is about 3 years out of warranty they seem more interested in selling me a newer model, but of course I can get help from their tech support for a "nominal" fee<cough>....as I stated earlier, I realize my best option is to go ahead and just buy a new drive...but this has pushed some buttons on me and I refuse to just give up until I know for sure what the problem is or any solution...just to double check on possibility of it being the game I'm attempting to run, I attempted to install game on the wife's laptop...it wasn't pretty folks....the look on her face when she caught me opening the drive with one hand and holding the disk in the other raised the hairs on the back of my neck....so if anybody else has any other ideas as to my situation please speak up....the life you save may just be mine

CD-RW is probably on it's way to being a doorstop....so I'll pick up a DVD-RW and install....thanks for the help guys...one good thing happened from all this though..after discovering this site and reading some posts I downloaded a few suggested programs such as PC Wizard 2006...nifty little program....was unable to benchmark my CD-RW though with it....that pretty much convenced me that my drive was faulty...now if I could just make sense of what all those benchmark results mean....