i have windows xp pro on a relativly new computer. it will not read
drive's with removable media such as cd-rom, floppy, zip, flash. it
sees the drive and they work in safe mode. usb accessories such as
camera, printer, scanner work fine.
have tried uninstalling and re-installing drivers. cd-rom will play
music cd if played through media player. it also reads the C drive
fine. with removable media all i get is "windows cannot read from this
disk. the disk may be corrupted or it may be using a format
incompatible with windows" or something similar. the problem seems to
have started after burning some DVD's with several new programs but
un-installing the programs did not fix it. will pay $25 for correct answer.

How many other types of storage media do you have?  ie:  Do you have
two hard disk drives and two CD/DVD ROM drives or more?

Are you on a network?

The reason that I ask is that if your "F:" drive is already taken -
especially on a network -- Windows XP isn't real good at assigning USB
media to drives above F: someimes.

In my environment, I have to assign the USB media to drive B:. 
Windows _assumes_ that F: is available and will attempt to 'override'
any medium attached to F: already.

i have 2 hard drives, 1 cd-rw, 1 dvd-rw, 1 floppy, 1 zip drive, 1
multi flash card reader. my usb flash drive comes up as drive "E".

You didn't do anything to the machine other than install software? 
Then, these errors started to occur?

thats correct. only software, i did not change any hardware. things
work in safe mode. i believe there could have been a period of a month
or two of daily use before i noticed the problem. another weird thing
is that i can burn disk's but it will not read them when i'm done.

Can other programs that run in XP read them? [like software that runs
off of the cd] Can you read them in the DOS prompt?

no, other programs cannot read them although you can play music cd's
if you start them with windows media player. at the DOS prompt it says
"the volume does not contain a recognized file system. please make
sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the
volume is not corrupt". with the floppy's, zip, and flash drives it
tells you it must be formatted.