Software problem with CD drives

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this, but it seems like a good place to start. Here is the scenario.

I play the RPG Neverwinter Nights, which requires a CD to play while the game is active. My problems began around January or so.

At the time, I was Running Windows 2000 with an Athlon processor. My machine had a basic 52x drive in it. The game had been playing fine for a few months. I go to play one day, and my drive won't acknowledge the disk. The light lights up that there is a disk in, but it doesn't make a conscious effort to read it. For the most part I never took the disk out of the drive. This persisted for a very long time. I tried taking out the drive and putting it back in, uninstalling it and reinstalling it. Uninstalling and reinstalling the software. When I tried that disk, it wouldn't go. However, I did find that if I held down the shift key when I pushed the disk in, it would read. That was my workaround for the time being. I tried a different disk in the drive, any other disk was fine. I put my game disk that wasn't working into two other computers, and it was fine.

Fast forward to last Thursday. I am still using the disk but have been using a completely new machine for the past 4 months. Windows XP pro, Pentium 4 with hyperthreading, 16x (old) Philips CD burner for a CD drive. Same neverwinter nights disk. My machine is now starting to do the same thing. this time, the holding shift work around does not work, it causes my machine to crash actually. However, if I leave my computer off for about a day or so, I can get the disk to run, but once I stop using the game, it will not reload again. Game still works in other computers. Other disks still work in machine. I have a new 16x Sony DVD ROM and an NEC DVD burner coming in in the next two days. Gonna see what happens then.

The only consistency in this problem is that it is the same disk and the CD drives are 5 or more years old or so. Is the disk defective? It has little to no scratches. Are the buffers on the drives too small? Is it a Microsoft problem? I do not know.