I Inserted an old, but scratch-less retail "Finding Nemo" disc 1 (2-disc collectors edtion) into a brand new Dell XPS system. The drive would not play the DVD and would lock up Vista for moments and slow down the system entirely. Once the disc was removed, the system would unfreeze, but would no longer play any DVD disc I tried after. I was forced to do a complete reinstall of the OS in order to get the drive to recognize any DVD media again.

(System was Vista OS SP1)

Thinking it was not the disc and perhaps a Vista issue, I put the Disney disc in another system which is about 3 years older. Again, after putting in the DVD, it locked up the system entirely... I couldn't believe it... and I was forced to reinstall XP Pro on that system after reformatting the HDD. This time, the DVD drive wouldn't work even after the reinstall. The drive is dead, won't play any DVD media, but will play CD's.

I'm 100% convinced the Disney disc has almost ruined the new drive, and killed my older drive, but how could this happen? How can a DVD kill a drive?

Is there any record of this happening to anyone?

...is wrong.
The only possible thing is that you made the mistake to allow AUTORUN/autoplay and some rootkit got installed........

I did a complete reformat and reinstall of my system and my DVD burner still won't read any DVD's.

Where is this rootkit ???

Hey, I think the rootkit is in the dvd burner itself which would explain why the reinstall didn't solve it.

Anyone know how I can clean it out?

Ha ha.

How exactly did you "reformat"?

Disable AutoPlay and install AnyDVD to remove protections then try again...