On my Mandrake 9.0 system, performing certain tasks (eg. looking at the /mnt directory with Konquerer, or opening up one of the Mandrake package manager applets) will cause it to poll the cd-rom drive. If there's no cd in the drive, the process will hang for about 30 seconds while it tries this. If I have a cd in the drive, the drive's light will flash briefly and things will be fine.

I'm guessing this is some sort of issue with whatever software ensures that the cd-rom drive is correctly mounted when there's a cd in there. But the 30 second delay is a bit much. Is there a way of fixing this that won't require me to manually mount and unmount the cdrom drive?