about 2-3 weeks ago, my cd-drive suddenly started acting silly when i was making my own cd/dvd's

Starter with small problems like 1 out of 5 cd's not working after the burning process, my dvd player in my living room showed "No disc" when i put the cd or dvd in it, sometimes it would just try to read the cd for hours straight , just saying "loading" , and after about 1 hour or so it would say "no disc"

Then i started getting error msg's every time i wrote cd's on 48x speed (max speed ) ( standard 700mb divx cd) , i had to put the burning speed manually down to 40x in order to get a succesfull job.

This also happend with DVD's , 4-5 days later. i had to put the speed down from 18x ( max ) to 16x in order to make it work.

Just got worse, and in the next 2 weeks ( until current day today ) the cd drive cant burn anyting. 100 out of 100 cd's or dvd's are failures. no error msg in NERO, the divx player ( and other divx players, i've tried many different ) just cant read the cds.

Sometimes the burning process takes about 30 minutes, ( should take around 3-4 minutes ) , and when it gets to the point where it sais "Writing short lead-out" ; a process wich should take about 10 seconds, takes almoust 5 minutes.

My computer switched from DMA to PIO mode after many failed attempts ( automatic switch in XP ) , wich in return results in extremly long burning sessions. Tried to burn a DVD today, 3GB, took about 55 minutes, but it was still a failure. The divx player couldnt read it. Tried another, 4,5GB wich took 45 minutes, that also was a failure.

in device manager i switched back to DMA if available on my drive, rebooted but still no progress.

Have tried re-installing NERO, no effect.

Im burning a cd as im writing this, and about every 4-5 minutes, my entire computer locks up, my mouse is unmovable, nothing happens when i press the keyboard, stayes entirely frozen for about 30 seconds ( only happens when i burn a cd or dvd )

My computer ; Windows XP fully updated, AMD athlon 64 x2dual 6400+ , 2048 ram ( 3,25GB ram totally ), 8800GTX ,

Nero Version : Nero 7 Premium.

Any ideas? :S