Why won't my DVD drive read my CDs?

[Faction]

This is one of those random disasters. I was using my computer yesterday, and then all of a sudden my computer did not read my CDs. I used a CD earlier yesterday and nothing was wrong. Later in the afternoon, the drive did not read the CD.

I opened the side and everything was plugged in. The drive is getting power because it does open. When I put the CD in, I hear the noise that it is reading the CD but nothing shows up. I put my game CD in and nothing happened.

The odd thing in that when I leave the CD in the drive and open up Firefox the computer freezes. Happened twice. Also when I leave the CD in to boot up, and I finally get to see my wallaper with my icons, and then computer freezes up again.

Sys. specs for the computer aren't special. It's a cheap barebones with a P4, and a Soundblaster 2 ZS Plat.

I don't know what to do. Could it be a virus or a driver issue? If it's a driver, which driver should I update?
Could it be something else?

Any help would be awesome, thanks.

[Faction]

Wow don't I feel like an idiot. The problem was spyware:mad: .

I just ran Spybot, deleted all the spyware it caught, put the cd in, and it worked.

[EsaT]

Wow don't I feel like an idiot. The problem was spyware:mad: .Cause would have been very hard to tell from symptoms soo that's not required.


And just a guess for helping to avoid this in the future, start using Opera or Firefox.

[jackies]

Whoa, what kind of spyware it was? Not that infamous sony thingie??

[Major_A]

Spybot is by far the lamest spyware program I've ran. Although I do use it's immunization database for IE. If you want a good free antispyware program get A-Squared Free (http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/free/). Right now it's malware database is at 500,000 items, Spybot is something like 48,000. Spyware Terminator (http://www.spywareterminator.com/) isn't too bad either. The best programs I've ran that weren't free were Spyware Doctor and Spyware Sweeper.