Hamish -

As SRS says, Device Manager and/or System Information should tell you what's not working, and perhaps why. One or both of these may give you the mfr and model number for your CD device, and you need specific info on this to look for a current driver for your device. I would strongly urge you to get a new one from the CD or computer maker if you can find one, since the drivers on any WinME disk will be obsolete. The disks themselves are different now.

A NORMAL PROCEDURE for a missing or defective device is to go to Device Manager and DELETE the device. When you reboot, Plug And Play (PnP) should detect a "new device" and ask you for whatever drivers etc it needs to install it. It will probably ask for your WinME installation disk(s), but if you can find a driver for your CD device you can tell it to use one you've downloaded from the drive mfr or from your OEM computer mfr. If PnP doesn't detect the device, you go back to Device Manager and click on something like "add new device" or "add new hardware," and tell the system to look for it.

Thus far, what we really know(?) is that:

1. your CD device doesn't work.
2. you just did an AV cleanup.
3. something has told you that a file, nfcd.dll, is missing.
4. nobobdy else seems to have the file nfcd.dll.

You haven't really said what told you that you need nfcd.dll, but a possible scenario here goes:

a. Some virus infections write a line into the Registry to reload themselves every time you reboot. The line usually calls up a .dll that runs the actual virus installation. Sometimes the .dll itself contains the infection, and sometimes it "calls" some other file to do the actual virus installation.

b. If the AV treatment removes the virus and/or the .dll reinstall file, but doesn't fix the Registry, you'll get an error message - something like "cannot find nfcd.dll" every time you boot, or possibly every time you try to use something that was affected by the virus.

c. Since AV normally expects to delete or quarantine anything infected before it gets installed the normal AV routines don't look for "non viral installed instructions" and remove them, so this happens fairly often on machines that were infected while there was no AV running, and are scanned later - after the viral installation was completed.

d. Since the AV treatment already removed everything it recognized as "viral" a rescan with AV will not tell you that this is an "inactive fragment left over from a previous infection."

An error message due to a removed virus is annoying, but it affirms that the virus itself is gone and isn't being reinstalled every time you reboot. Removing the error message usually requires a Regedit, so you should just ignore the message until you're certain that's what's causing it.

If deleting and reinstalling your CD drive doesn't help:

If you have your WinME installation disk(s), some Windows versions let you go to Control Panel, Add/Remove programs, and if you select "Windows" will ask if you want an "install" or a "check for missing or damaged files." I don't know whether WinME includes this "check" ability, so perhaps someone who has WinME could let us know.

If the "check for missing or damaged" feature is present, it usually is safe enough to run without much concern about losing data or non-Win programs (but backup is always good if you have a place to put stuff). If a needed file is missing, this procedure usually will put it back; but a "dynamic .dll" that gets edited to suit the installation and is corrupted may be missed, so it's not 100 percent. This procedure may get your CD device working, but it will NOT likely remove a .dll call from a prior infection, so you'll still get the "cannot find..." error.

If the "check for missing or damaged" feature isn't there, you can usually do a reinstall Windows without danger to data files, but you would probably need to reinstall some - perhaps many - other programs. The number of such other programs, and whether you have install disks for all of them would be important, and I'd recommend not jumping into a complete reinstall until other possibilities have been exhausted.

John