When users select or clicks on an CD-R(W) or DVD R(W) optical drive on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 the drive tray will auto eject/open and pop-up an “Insert disc” dialog box to ask for a CD or DVD media to be placed into the drive. Here you will find a tutorial and a tool to disable this feature.

Great, Vista and Server 2008 are supposedly smart enough to eject when there are no disc in the drive. Well, the happiness only lasted for a week and after that it became a real annoyance.

Why? Well because I will occasionally click on the DVD-RW drive when I actually wanted to access my hard drive. (always in a hurry)
This is not a real big problem on a workstation, as the user can easily push the optical drive`s button to close it again. On the otherside, on a Server? Microsoft what have you been thinking? It could take weeks for someone to notice the tray is opened, in the meantime the optical drive could have collected all the dust it ever dreamed of.

Apparently this feature depends on the built-in CD burning features on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. I noticed on Windows Vista this behaviour only occurs on CD-R(W) or DVD R(W) optical drives (i think it is suposed that way)
Shocking it was to notice on Windows Server 2008 this behaviour showed on a regular DVD drive as well. (MS, Whats up with that?)

Here is how to disable this feature

1. Run gpedit.msc (Group Policy Editor) from Start Search.
2. Expand Local Group Policy
3. Expand User Configuration
4. Expand Administrative Templates
5. Finally expand Windows Components
6. Select Windows Explorer.
7. In the right pane, double click on Remove CD burning features.
8. Select Enabled radio button to stop and disable all features in the Windows Explorer that allow users to use their CD writer to burn.
9. Click OK when done.

Alternativly you can download this a tool i wrote that automates this procedure