Hi, I've been having some trouble with my cdrom drive on SuSE9. On KDE whenever I insert a CD and click on the icon to read it I can no longer use the little button on the drive to eject it and have to right-click on the icon and choose "eject". On Gnome its a bit worse; the drive isn't mounted on startup (at least I believe so) and I have to right-click on the desktop and choose the drive for it to appear. It won't work if there is no cd on the drive and again I can't use the eject button. Also when I remove the disk the drive is unmounted again. Thx.

not sure about the eject part.

The rest seems like perfectly normal behavior. A CD shouldn't automatically mount on startup, shouldn't stay mounted when the disk is removed, and shouldn't mount when there's no disk in the drive.
You're misinterpreting the purpose of "mount", if I'm reading you correctly.
When you mount a CD, you're mounting the disk, not the drive. There's no filesystem in a CD drive unless it contains a disk, so no way to mount it.

I have RH 9.0. I have always performed the ejection process that way. Is this a change in state from the current version or did you upgrade the kernel and it stop working?

I think what is going on is that the drive itself isn't loaded (not sure how to call it) on startup unless I insert a CD. Or maybe it is... except that there is no icon on the desktop and its nowhere to be found on the filesystem (on mandrake it was on /mnt/cdrom). All I need is a shortcut on my desktop that stays there even if the drive is empty (so that I don't have to make it show up everytime I insert a CD). I haven't upgraded anything yet, same kernel.

you must be making reference to /etc/fstab?

if you are I think I have the howto on it that was pulled from linuxquestions.org