taichi wrote:Curiously, once I finished my Norton session, the eject button works perfectly well, every time.
Ah... well now it
does sound as if it's just Norton being Norton. I got rid of all Norton programs on my personal systems a long time ago, because they are so intrusive, sometimes lock up for no reason (like what you are describing), and consume so many resources. It seems their Anti-Virus wants to dominate and completely take over a person's system. I received a laptop recently which had Norton Internet Security installed and like 90 days or something left on the subscription. Who cares? That's worthless to me, so I uninstalled it right away, and boy, it sure does take a long time to get out. I really am not a big fan of Norton/Symantec as you can tell. Whenever I uninstall Norton Antivirus from systems, the next time I boot up there is always a
noticeable difference in how fast I can start entering data and opening programs. There is also a noticeable difference in how much faster the system continues to operate without Norton being resident in the background. I then install a free Anti-virus/utility program which has a small footprint
and speeds up, not slows down my system 
Then I use that same program to do a deep registry cleaning, since uninstalling Norton messes with a lot of registry settings. I have found this particular Antivirus/Utility program to be very, very effective- plus, it's completely free (just bugs you once in a while to upgrade):
http://download.cnet.com/Advanced-Syste ... 07614.html When installing, just decline the Yahoo Toolbar or other nonsense they offer. [*Note- I am not a spokesman for Advanced System Care, just found their program to be very effective so far... ] I've used it for years without
any virus on
any of my personal systems. Meanwhile, I have helped many friends to clean up their system after a virus attack (which oftentimes includes a complete wiping of the hard drive, and therefore a loss of any data which was not backed up). And I can testify that people usually get viruses from using virus-infected flash drives from their friends, or by simply not using wisdom and discretion in the websites they visit and download stuff from, including porn and other vulgar stuff they're into
I understand you're using Norton 360 to do backups, however, there are many other programs out there. But if you really love Norton, then simply do a complete uninstall, and reinstall it form the original discs and see if that stops the backup lockups.
What I would also do at this point is simply try recording a full music CD using I.B.M. RecordNow, which is a solid and reliable program, and verifies the CD data afterwards. Then, play the music CD you made for a minute, skipping to a few different songs to check them. Also play a DVD movie. Once everything has recorded, and played back smoothly, the eject button functions normally, and the CDRW/DVD Rom drive is not unreasonably noisy under Cd or DVD play, then I would say you have
a healthy drive. If the CD burning fails then try a different CD, and maybe even a different brand or one from a new spindle. It's always possible to get a bad batch you know. In that case, (seeing that RecordNow is a solid and reliable program), you would isolate the problem between the Cd's you're using and/or CD drive.
Daniel.
