CD-ROM Device does not answer

Hi,

I have a strange problem. My CD/DVD Device does not work any more.
Everything started after I did a few windows and lenovo driver updates. First
the cd-rom device did not anymore work from time to time. Now the computer
has severe problems if the device is plugged in:

- in windows mode the screen freezes in suddenly as long as the device is
plugged, if you disconnect the device everything works fine again
- booting the machine causes now from time to time system halts, so that I
have to reboot the machine

I read that this could be caused by wrong registry entries. I've updated its
firmware and the BIOS of my thinkpad as well. But that changed nothing yet.

The message in german: Das Gerät \Device\Ide\IdePort1 hat innerhalb der
Fehlerwartezeit nicht geantwortet.

directly translated: The device \Device\Ide\IdePort1 did not anser within
the failure wait time.

More data:

Laptop: IBM Thinkpad R40
Device: Panasonic Matsutshi UDJA740

I hope you can help me anyhow!