WindowsME and hardware wackiness

For the past couple weeks, whenever I run certainly memory intensive applications ,my cd-rom drive begins to freak out! By 'freak out' I mean the bay door begins to open and shut uncontrollably, and very often the mouse locks up forcing me to reboot the PC.

I also noted upon reboot that monitor will flash something to the effect that it's establishing some type of default configuration for my drives (i.e. the cd-rom drive).

Could there be a hardware problem that's brought about by memory issues created by running programs? I have two of the same PCs (both Compaq Presarios), both configured the same way albeit for minor things, and the other one does not freak out as described above. Could it be a virus? I've run virus scans but I come up clean.

Does anyone have any idea what type of Windows system or hardware diagnostics I could run to ferret out the problem?

Thanks,

really sounds like virus activity to me, may be a bad install corrupted the driver files. My best advice is, it is a compaq, it came with a format and recovery cd, format and recover. then if the problem persist might want to check for bad hardware.

Well, I opened the case and disconnected the power supply and controller cable from the R/W CD drive. Seems to work OK now, but I now need to figure out if the drive itself or the controller cable is bad.

Since my CD-ROM and my R/W CD both share the same cable, I'm tending to think the R/W CD drive may have gone bad.

I did initially try to remove the R/W CD using the control panel and then have the PC automatically find and configure the drive, but this didn't help.

Basically, the R/W CD drive light would come on after a couple minutes after boot up and then freeze up my PC. Disconnecting the drive has solved the problem for now.