Thanks for the suggestions. It appears the CD drive is likely the problem. Strangely it doesn’t seem to have any drivers. Found the disc that came with it and even went to the website and there are no drivers, only utility softwares like Nero & ASUS E-Green. Firmware is up to date. But I did install the Nero disc speed checker and discovered the drive is only operating at about 8x speed, and it’s a 48x drive. Time to get a new drive it looks. I shouldn’t be surprised I guess, it is about a 5 year old drive (so is the rest of my pc, yikes!), it has served me well haha.

I had freelancer installed and working on windows 7, but then I did a full wipe of my hard drives and reinstalled my OS, it was just that time…Anyways now I cannot get Freelancer to install again. It just freezes up in the setup screen for like 10 minutes, and then finally when the install dialogue does come up, it tells me to put the freelancer disk in, and then I realize my CD drive is no longer recognized by my PC. Did entire annoying process again, and same result. I can see the CD drive there and it’s loading for another 10 minutes, and then right before the install window comes up, my CD drive disappears from the My Computer window…I’m guessing it might have something to do with some type of DRM. I don’t remember having this problem the last time I installed it. I’ve googled and everyone says it will install just fine normally from the disc. I already turned off UAC and set the setup to compatability with winxp. Any suggestions? Thanks.