"I have not yet tried to burn a CDROM"
That might be interesting to try. But I fear this may not be an operating system problem but a drive problem. It would also be interesting to take note of the drive's behavior when putting in a disk. Listen for noises to determine what the drive is doing as components move. Do you actually hear the disk spin up once in the drive? If the sounds indicate repeated seeking then the drive is having a hard time reading the disk. Have you tried running one of those cleaning disks through it to see what happens? That once fixed a problem for me when the drive would not recognize disks. Also observe activity lights to see if it's actually reading the drive.
