John T, I am still having some problems, so I can't reach the conclusion that the Autofix program will definitely do the job. However, now that I have run the program, I am having fewer problems, so for some people running Autofix may help.
My Dell is about a year old and from the beginning I often had to eject and reinsert a disk after powering on in order to get the drive to work. This almost always did the trick until recently.
When I started having problems with MC, I also had some problems getting MS Streets and Trips 2002 and regular audio CDs to play. The few times I've tried since using Autofix, those disks have been fine.
Tonight after powering on, I used IE to visit some internet sites. Then I put a computer created audio CD in the drive. Autoplay is supposed to launch into MC. It didn't. When I tried to access the disk from within MC, I got the same message as reported in the opening post. Then I went into WMP and Creative Play Center and the disk was read fine. When I closed those programs and went back into MC, MC did read and play the disk. Go figure.