Vista - Explorer hang whenever trying to read fron CD/DVD

Hi there, I'm just landing into this forum o see if some expert can help me out with this issue, so first of all

HELLO EVERYBODY !!

And now, I have an Acer (Core2Quad with 3Gb) with Vista Home Premium that was running so great that made me think finally windows made it (I started with 3.1 when I had an age I can't remember and always found a "but" for the system)
Now, someday last week something happen (who knows?!) and suddenly whenever I try to install from cd, read a cd burn a dvd or whatever, the explorer hangs and is never back to life again. I have to restart the machine.

Funny is that the IOMEGA half-tera external usb disc doesn't show this problem, neither usb memory stick, photo cameras, whatever... only the CD/DVD

I already tried disabling DEP (it's already turned off) but no way.... You place the CD, then autostart pops-up, you click on whatever ("run setup.exe" for example) and this is it. The CD spins for a minute, thens stops and no way to get explorer back again... it stays on way, you cannot kill it from taskmanager, etc.. restarting the computer is the only option. If you have programs started they still work. Only IE seems to have conectivity problems.

The system is clean as it came from the shop, only addons are the iomaega half a tera external disc an a D-link rangebooster wifi usb antenna

any light ?? should I roll back any update??


help in advance. It's been already 10 days fighting to this issue and I'm already a bit mad about it

Greetings from Barcelona

Forgot to say that system is theoretically clean as I use Spyboot S&D updated to the last bit of info.

Have you verified that the drive actually works, say in another machine?

After all, it is a mechanical device and prone to failure just as much as any other device.

Hi, thx johngalt for the reply!!!!
Nope. I still didn't want to open the box as it is in fact reading a the beginning. The autoplay works (at least pops up) and actually if you open explorer and open CD-DVD drive you can see the contents. For instance I have one of those catalogs of a provider of mine, you click on the drive and see the pdf. Double click it and yap... it's gone.
I'm now at ACER website downloading all I can find regarding drivers, chipset updates and stuff like that to see if there's some update after SP1 of Vista that may conflict with the DVD. I just found out that is an SCSI device and also in the hardware manager I see there s a VOBID Instantdrive CD SCSI CdRom Device together with a HL-DT-ST DVDRAM_GSA_H60N SCSI CdRom Device... but ok, HW manager has always been a little weird presenting its contents so I hope the Acer downloading thing works.... I'll let you know.

If somebody else has a hint it is really welcome and appreciated !!