So this is pretty weird. When I put a non-black disk int teh drive Exploere
totally freezes until I hit the eject button or, in some cases, manual open
the drive. when I first put the disc in it lights up solid then starts
blinking for asecond or two then the drive stops blinking and the PC blinks.
I have waited several minutes (get up, go to the kitchen, make coffee, and
come back kinda wait).

I have been able to put a blank CD in and use teh record option which starts
a burn process. Most of the time however it sits at 100% tryin to finalize
and never seems to get the job done so I can have a readable outcome.

I have tried to remove and reinstall the drive, I tried to mess around with
the DMA settings (not sure what to do in registry as I saw there might be
some fix in there). WinXP had a similar issue which I think I haad to chang
eit to PIO mode from DMA, but Icanot seem to fin that settng in Vista. I
tried to uncheck the DMA setting, but I rebooted and the flag came back in
DMA mode.

Any thoughts?