BleepingComputer.com: weird DVD drive issues

Ok all, this is stumping me, and its probably something stupid that I will kick myself in the rear for later, but Im having this strange problem. I just purchased a Samsung CD/DVD writer with lightscribe awhile back, and it works great for the most part. plays movies like a charm, installs all programs I throw in it, whether on CD or DVD, and burns both CDs and DVDs fine. the problem is it wont play music CDs. No matter what. It gets about 30-40 seconds into the first song, then skips to the end of the song and then skips every track until the CD is done. with windows media player that is all it did, with PowerDVD and Real One player it gave me error codes saying the CD was corrupt and unreadable. I tried several CDs, some scratched some completly flawless, all of which play on every other CD player I own without so much as a skip. the fact it reads and opens data CDs, installation CDs, scratched or not, with no issue, it only does this with music CDs with every type of software ive used. Im using windows vista ultimate 64 bit, and everything is up to date. Ive never seen anything like this before, it almost seems software related as it seems to read and write everything else with ease, yet all my software is up to date and my old CD drive played CDs no problem. games, applications, everything but music. anyone else have a clue whats up here? CD drive? software?

Does this happen for audio cd's or mp3 cd's

have not tried an burned CD, all the music CDs I have tried are the original artist audio CDs.

That is a perplexing problem

I would have to chalk it up to a defective drive
Maybe flash the ROM chip

I suppose thats possible this is actually the second one of this type first one failed right after installation and I RMAd it, but its just off, if it was a bad drive, why would it read every other type of format but music?

Does the drive have a model number?
It's a shame Dachew hasn't been around lately

You might try asking these guys
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic3616.html

you think it might be a virus? the thought entered my mind, but I run komodo and it hasnt found anything. Ill run a couple of these just in case komodo missed something though normally its pretty good. thanks for the advice. :D and the drive is a samsung SH-S223

This post has been edited by the_patriot09: 20 October 2009 - 07:04 PM

after doing some research I found microsofts solution. they blame it on third party software messing with the registry and give me this fix http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;834483 however, the MCI key is non existent in my registry. I have direct sound and speaker config subfolders under media resources, originally, and when I tried installing a codec pack (which also didnt work) it installed an ICM folder. (which wasnt there before but didnt solve the problem) so Im thinking that microsoft might be partly right it might be something to do with the registry but I dont mess with the registry enough to know how to fix it. arg. hate to have to reformat the drive just to get the registry back to the way it was. . .

oh, and I ran multiple virus scans all came up clean.