It still plays most fine, but Yesterday I was trying to reinstall Print Shop and the CD spun for a few seconds and then just sat there.

It's a relatively inexpensive Lite On I got at Walmart. Today I tried to install DE: Invisible War and the same thing happened. I experimented some more and it also happened with Black & White and a couple of other older games.

Everything newer still works without a problem.

Is the DVD Rom just breaking down? I've only had it for a few months and the workload has been pretty light.

thats pretty normal as far as DVD rom drives go. they are all made cheap, in my opinion. my NEC drive, which was hugely acclaimed, doesnt read normal CDs anymore, only DVDs. i used to keep replacing optical drives all the time, now i just rip my games and musicto the hdd, and forget about the disc. cause its only gonna take a couple months to wear out the cheap lasers in the optical drives.

This doesn't surprise me. I have a Lighton that's an older model that stopped reading and writing cd's all together, and now only works with DVD's