Jbennet, I am not sure I understand:
a) blacklisted app - something related to the game? (btw - this happens for both fear and Crysis), or is this more general? .iso is an image file correct? I do have a couple of cd and dvd burning progs.

b) i played for quite a while before this started.

Inserted the following disks:
XP - found
A8V mb - found
airlink router disk - found
F.E.A.R. - light blink a lot - drive thinks it is empty
FarCry - found
Crysis - light blinks a lot - sucked up most of non-memory resources, Event Services says "The driver detected a controller error on \device\\cdrom0"
Unreal tournament - 2004 - lights - disk not found
FarCry - found (just to make sure)

Sigh! It does not want me wasting time playing games, I guess (or at least the games I want to play)

oh right thats wierd

generally problems like that are because the copy protection is incompatible with the drive or it detects things which may be used to circumvent it.

but its odd that it ran it before.....

try uninstall drive in device manager and reboot to reinstall the drive ,also make sure that the disks are not dirty

hmmm, couldn't upgrading firmware be a simpler solution??

Thanks, caperjack - that got me my dvd player back <<dope slap - D'Oh!>>. It also seemed to fix a different problem I had but that needs further research.

jbennet - I will get my Crysis config shortly.

your welcome ,sometime its the simple stuff!

giving that a bad or update with the wrong firmware or computer shutdown in the middle of the update ,could ruin the dvd drive ,i will have to say no!it is much easier to uninstall the device

do not buy any cards in a retail store
WAY TOO EXPENSIVE
use pricewatch.com, then you will see $$
usually best overall places are
newegg.com // tigerdirect.com // and clubit.com