CD Rom Issue

I'm having all sorts of funky crap going on with this PC, but the worst part is my CD Rom not working right. I can't view any data on a cd (even data cds I KNOW have stuff on them), which means I can't really burn off all my stuff for when I will probably have to eventually reformat the PC. Yet, on the same drive, I can play a CD ROM game. I have run Avira, Spybot, and AVG and none of them pick anything up intruder-wise. I'm confused! I'm running an Acer desktop with XP.
We won't discuss the sluggishness of the PC or the issues I'm starting to have with Firefox... one thing at a time! I just need my CD drive back so I can burn everything off and reformat this puppy!