1. If you're getting Automatic Updates with WinXP, they shouldn't be "piling up," if you just let them install as they arrive. They need to be installed when/as you get them, since they don't do you any good until they're put in place. If you have uninstalled updates, you need to install them.

There will be a file on your hard drive for each update, in C:\Windows, that's an "Uninstall" script for each update, so that you can uninstall an update that causes a problem. These will include "Uninstall" and the Bulletin Number for the update in the filename, and will be Hidden files. Although there may be a lot of them, they don't actually take much drive space, so I generally just leave them there. You probably can remove them, at least older ones, once you're sure the update did install and didn't crash something.

2. Unless it's a very old drive that you carried over on a machine that you upgraded to WinXP, the Plug-N-Play in Windows should find it and install it automatically if the drive is working. Your descriptions sound like perhaps the drive itself has died. Optical drives do seem to be one of the least reliable pieces of hardware in recent computers.

3. Some optical Drive (CD and DVD) makers have pretty good diagnostic utilities that you can download and run on your machine to find out whether the drive itself is functional. Ideally you'd look for one from whoever made your drive, but OEM builders often use generic idents for them, so it may be difficult to find out who made one that came with a machine. Sometimes even opening the machine and looking at the nameplate doesn't tell you much. Any of the diagnostics probably will work for telling whether the drive hardware died, but may not give you as much helpful info as the one from your drive's maker. If necessary, look for a name on the Driver that Windows tries to install for yours.

4. Something you might try is creating a "repair disk" (also called "recovery disk" and/or "boot disk") and seeing if you can get the CD Drive recognized when you boot to DOS or boot to Safe Mode from the disk. Assuming you have a floppy drive, the boot disk may require a couple of floppies. WinXP Help files (From Start|Help) should have instructions, including how to put a default CD drive support on the disks. You may need your installation disks to make a boot disk, and of course they're probably on a CD (or a DVD). If you're lucky, a default installation usually saves the necessary installation files on your hard drive, so you may be able to browse to those when/if the system asks for an installation disk. Look for a bunch of "*.CAB" files. This will give an indication if the drive itself is at least partially functional; but won't tell you a lot about what to do about it.

BOTTOM LINE:

If WinXP PnP can't install it after you've "deleted" the drive and rebooted, chances are that it's going to require hands-on work, possibly a drive replacement, to get things working.

John