I have had that happen also. The first time I thought the system had hung and pressed the reset. I think I did that 2 or 3 times. Last time I walked away for a while and when I came back it had booted. I have found that all windows versions have problems with bad CDs, particularly CD RWs. A bad CDRW inserted in the drive will even cause XP to go into neverland, sometimes to never recover without a hard reboot. I think MS should consider rewriting some of the CD reading code to safely handle this problem. Congrats on figuring it out, without prior knowledge it is an odd beast to understand.