Bizarre CD-RW/DVD-ROM instability issue

On my just-build P4C 2.4 system (Asus P4C800-E Deulxe), I find that, whenever the CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive is connected to the IDE bus (it's on a PATA channel of its own with a 40-wire cable), the system (running WinXP) is bizarrely unstable. Firstly, it takes a long time to boot (five minutes or so between the login screen and the desktop), and, when I changed the device channel by swapping the IDE connector to which the CD was attached, the system would start fine (seemingly), but freeze whenever I tried the start menu, then, about four or five minutes later, tell me that it had finished installing the software for my new device and needed to restart, whereupon the same error as before would occur.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be? The drive in question is a Samsung SM-152

did you check device manager (whenever you could get into windows ok besides being slow) to see if there was a yellow exclamation point besides the drive?

I did and there isn't.