Explorer freezes too when an external hard drive spins up, very annoying.
I remember my older Macs and Windows 98 laptops liked spinning the CD randomly, sometimes waiting to read it. I'd eject it when I hear it spinning. No CD for you.
I kept my floppy drive installed until I got tired of explorer freezing every time I accidentally selected it (quite often as I have a habit of navigating with the keyboard)
It's such a strange issue which existed in Windows for ages, even though on the surface it seems like it would be easy to fix.