I have a Matsu****a SR-8585 DVD player, which lately has been behaving strangely. It reads discs verrry slowly, sometimes not at all, other times it just stops responding entirely. It can take 2-3 minutes from when I insert a CD just to see its contents.

I've checked the device manager and there are no problems or conflicts reported. The official site doesn't have new drivers, saying that Windows XP supports it by default. The rest of my computer is fine and I scan it regularly, so I don't think it's a virus. Anybody have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

I can think of 2 possibilities. First is a little program called Cdilla that can wreak havoc with optical drives in the name of copy protection. I would run Spybot or AdAware to see if you have it or something similar infesting your system.

Second is that the drive is simply dying and/or dirty. I would run a disk cleaner in the drive and see if that helps. If no change, I would start shopping...

Thanks for the advice. Well, it wasn't spyware, and the CD cleaner didn't work, so I guess I'll have to open it up and have a look.

Probably time to go shopping.... (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=property&DEPA=1) :)