DVD Drive problem: Next troubleshooting step?

OS: Windows XP

For a long time I've been running two players in my system. I've never had much use for having two of them, but I've always liked the idea of them both being there. Originally I had a NEC DVD Burner that worked perfectly and a NEC DVD reader (harvested from a previous system: DV-5500A) that would give me a blue screen of death if I put anything into it. Oddly, after the reboot, if I left the disk in the drive, I could play it just fine. Weird huh? Anyway, both were IDE drives, with the poorly functioning drive slaved to the one that worked.

I had that setup for about 2 years... now fast forward to today: I get myself a used TS-H653N (Dell I think, possibly HP). Since I've got a spare SATA slot, I pulled out the old NEC and pop in the "new" drive. Everything booted up fine, and XP correctly identified the drive and everything seems to be going smooth... until I start trying to put discs into it.

I can put a CD into the drive, and it will read the CD for about 1 to 2 minutes before XP crashes and reboots (says it recovers from a critical error). A DVD is even worse, as XP will crash usually during spin up. At that point I figured I managed to purchase a bad drive.

Then the next step: on one of the crashes I loaded up Ubuntu instead of XP. I figured if Ubuntu couldn't handle the drive, then I'd know for sure. Surprisingly, Ubuntu handled the drive flawlessly. I could read, write, swap disks, etc. The drive was working even better than the NEC that has always held the top slot in my rig. I decided on a whim (ok not really a whim) to toss the old NEC back in and see if Ubuntu would be kind to that drive as well. Indeed it was.

So, I've pretty much narrowed this strange crash problem to XP. And with it crashing on two different drives in the "#2" spot, I think it has something to do with XP not liking the secondary drive (which is strange since the TS-H653N is technically a master of it's own buss).

I turned off the reboot on system failure and captured the same message on both drives: PAGE_FAULT_IN_UNPAGED_AREA. In order to rule out malware/viruses, I've done several full sweeps of my system with various programs (found nothing). I also defragged which, as expected, didn't really help.

The crash also happens in safe mode, which doen't not encourage me towards a positive resolution.

From here I really need guidance. What is the best way to go about resolving this issue without formatting and re-installing XP (Plus hoping really hard that I don't get the same problem again)? Is this a known issue with XP, or am I looking at some kind of file corruption?

If you need more information, please let me know.