CD Writer Keeps Being Accessed and Freezing Mouse and Keyboard

[mrskyp]

My XP Pro updates are fully up to date except for IE8, which I have removed.

I have a vague but exasperating problem with my system and don't know where
to begin to track it down: after a few minutes of XP being up and running,
my Philips CD writer keeps being accessed about every few minutes (no CD in,
the unit is not new). About half the time, this behaviour is accompanied by
keyboard and mouse lockup and my C-drive accessing(read-write unknown). After
about 20secs everything unfreezes again. No error message. No indication in
Task Manager - CPU usage remains minimal. This problem did not occur before
installing IE8. I followed MS instructions to uninstall back to IE7, however
the above symptoms still occur, albeit less frequently.

Can anyone offer some insight on the cause please?

 

[Gurpreet Singh]

The following steps might help. Download and run "process monitor" from
http://www.sysinternals.com and kepe it running. NExt time when you see the
CD writer being accessed and the system recovers from the lockup stop the
process monitoring and the search in the list for any attemps to access the
drive letter of the cd writer and this should aldo tell you the process that
tries to access it. Other option would be to disable the cd writer from the
bios and observe if any attempts are still made and if any errors pop up.