SATA DVD Freezing Windows 7

Hi;

This is strange problem that has been giving me grief for a while now.

I have had an NEC Optiarc DL DVD in a HTPC system and has been working flawlessly for a couple of years, the DVD drive itself has had very little use.
Abit AN-M2HD Mobo, AM2 AMD 64x2 4000+ CPU, 2GB Corsair XMS2 Memory, I have been using Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2005.

The other day I decided to give Windows 7 a try and that's when my problems started, originally I was using my original setup with a Maxtor 200GB IDE HDD and my NEC Optiarc DVD Drive, Windows 7 would just not play after much testing etc I finally resolved the problem by replacing the SATA DVD drive with an IDE DVD drive then Windows 7 installed fine.

I have since replaced my IDE HDD with a new Maxtor Diamond Max 23 250GB SATA drive and again installed Windows 7 using the IDE DVD Drive, once I got an additional SATA cable and power adaptor I decided to re-fit my old NEC SATA DVD Drive in order to remove a legacy IDE drive from my sytem.

The DVD Drive is now causing problems, if I try to read a data DVD or watch a DVD Movie in either Windows Media Centre, Windows Media Player or VLC Media Player the drive spins up starts to read the DVD pays the first 10-15 seconds of the DVD then the software running the application just freezes and I have to exit it using Windows Task Manager?!?!?

As a test I just put my old 200GB IDE drive back in with the NEC Optiarc SATA DVD Drive and installed Windows XP Pro, the installation finished without a hitch so the DVD drive does not have a problem reading CDs???

My next test will be to now try and read a DVD using the NEC drive with Win XP

Any ideas what the problem is.