The message 1108986213.5690.215547627@webmail.messagingengine.com from "Richard Lewis" richardlewis@fastmail.co.uk contains these words:
I had to close Debian down before the CD drive would operate again.
This happens to me every now and then. I find that opening a command shell and su'ing to root then issuing "eject /cdrom" (or whatever the CD mount point is) usually works.
Yes, or you may have to: # umount /path/to/cdrom (mount point or device)
If you have anything running with the CD-ROM mount point as its working directory (be it Nautilus, KSCD, terminal or whatever) then umount will report that the drive is busy and won't let you unmount it.
But I closed down the window, and the failed wake-up call to Wine, so there should have been nothing eyeing lustfully the CD ROMdrive.