If your not comfortable, get that way; this may take a few minutes...
I have 2 optical drives; D: drive is a DVD-ROM drive, E: drive is a CD-RW drive. While running under Win ME, my son installed a program called Virtual CD, allowing you to copy CDs and DVDs to the hard drive and play them from there without the actual disks. Whether by design or mistake, it attached itself to drive letter E:. We could still use the physical drive, burn CDs on it, etc., but it was also the letter for the virtual drive.
Then I converted to Win XP. Now I can not longer use the physical drive E: at all. It will not read CDs, it will not Burn CDs. It seems that everything that tries to access or use the E: drive is trying to find a 'virtual CD'. I uninstalled the program, but the physical and virtual E: drives seem to still intertwined somehow. I tried disconnecting the cable to the drive and rebooting... Drive E: dissappeared from My Computer, virtual or otherwise. When I reconnected it, and rebooted, it comes up again as a 'virtual CD' on drive E:.
Any clues as to what I should try next?
Thanks...

Virtual CD is a CD imaging applet that harkens back before they started adding copy protection schemes. It's frankly next to useless when it comes to using commercial applications.
Uninstall Virtual CD, reboot and see what happens. Something happened in the transition from ME to XP and I got a funny feeling that program may have its own copy protection scheme that might have screwed the drive up.

I have tried the uninstall already. No luck. There is no program anymore, but the operating system still acts like it's trying to find the 'virtual' drive. When I insert a disk, nothing happens; no autostart, etc. With the disk in the drive, I went to My Computer, E: drive, and no files show up. I'm still puzzled.