When I first got my CD-RW drive it came with an old version of Nero, and sometimes while it was trying to burn a CD it'd reboot the computer spontaneously (thus destroying the CD). I think the problem went away when I got a newer version of Nero, and eventually got rid of Win98 and got WinME, then WinXP. If you don't have access to newer versions of Windows, maybe you should reinstall Windows from scratch. Hard drive reformatting and Windows reinstalling from scratch is the only solution I've found that works 100% of the time for many Windows problems. It's pathetic, but that's Windows for you. Did your CD drive come with a driver CD? If so maybe remove the auto-Windows installation of it, and then install the drivers from the CD. Maybe Windows picked a crappy driver.