My team of volunteers and I found an error that seems to be related to the presence/absence of a CD in the CD-ROM drive.

With no CD in the drive, opening "My Computer" results in a long pause, we assume while the empty drive is being read, until the window finally displays information. We also find when an address is manually typed into the Address Bar in IE6, there is a long pause before navigating to the site (navigating via links or "My Favorites" works fine).

We noticed, quite by accident, that the problems do not occur when there is a CD in the drive.

This issue occurs on 3 of 4 identical systems:

IBM PC 300GL (6282)
Pentium 200MHz
128MB RAM
Windows 2000 (SP3)
Office XP (SP1 & 2)
Creative 24X CD-ROM drives

Has anyone experienced this issue or have a solution aside from leaving a CD in the drive? (Of course, the CD is an easy solution, but I'm still curious.)

Thanks!

May due to system requirements

Computer/Processor 133 MHz or higher Pentium-compatible CPU
Memory 256 MB of RAM recommended minimum (128 MB minimum supported; 8 GB maximum)
Hard Disk 2 GB hard disk with a minimum of 1.0 GB free space. (Additional free hard disk space is required if you are installing over a network.)
CPU Support Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports up to eight CPUs on one machine

No, havent had that one, but you might see if turning on the auto-insert notification thingy is turned on, try turning it off. Easy way to do it in 2k is to download the tweakUI prog, or you can do it like this:

Click the Start button followed by selecting "Run". Type in "gpedit.msc" and click OK. Click and expand "Computer Configuration", followed by "Administrative Template", followed by "System". Check to see if its enabled, if it is, just double click and change it to disable. Hope this helps.

Other way to try is just to dump the CDROM drive outta device manager, and reboot, and let it reinstall itself. See if that helps too. Might try a firmware patch from the manufacturer as well, check on the man. website.