Hi BJurry
I have read all of the replies here. I think possibly you might have what I had some time back. I have similiar models of the DVD drive your mention. I have the TSSTcorp SH-S183L's. Firstly, correct they are a joint venture manufacture between Toshiba and Samsung, hence the TSST in the name. I don't think these are your real problem as they are very good products. I experienced something of your problem a while back. Some things I found to fix my problems, firstly some of the purchased music CD's I own had this notorius root kit installers on them (read the fiasco a couple of years ago with Sony and some of it's media). When you run them in a PC drive it will silently install a program, commonly as a rootkit, onto your system. Very buggy and caused me headaches with my drives and MC. Also I found I had, from my game side, the Starforce protection on my drive, again installed via a game I owned. This added to my problems. It took me a while, and a lot of research, but I found tools on the internet to firstly identify these unauthorised installed programs, and with quite a bit of difficulty, remove them. Now all is returned back to normal. I started with a product called Protection Id ver 0.6 beta (only this version to use, as the earlier versions flag most known Antivirus programs). This program will help you identify what is on your music CD's (and game CD's and DVD's for that matter), and what is on your HDD. I then went to Sony's web site to download their uninstaller, which worked for my "rootkit", and then I used my antivirus program to scan for and remove any other "rootkits" and remnants.
I haven't got too technical here as I am not sure of your competency level, as this can be intense and very time consuming and frustratingto get rid of "rubbish like this". I am trying to remember a number of other programs I found and used to get rid of this on my drives, but I will respond as soon as I have some more info. I hope this helps you to start off with finding what your real problem is, and eradicate it.
Regards