CD-Rom only sees .cda Files

The computer only sees .cda files, no matter what CD I put in the drive. A friend had a bad installation of MS office 2000 so I went over with my copy to uninstall and reinstall. The program uninstalled but would not boot up my copy so I figured that it was my disk or there was some of the old program lurking about so I left it and tried to get another copy. I found another copy and went back just recently and when I put in the disc it took forever to read, like at least 2 minutes and then opened there audio player so I went exploring. I went to my computer and saw that it was recognizing that the CD was 505mb, so I hit explore and all it came up with was a 44kb .cda (audio file?)and I knew for a fact that there were 3 different programs on the disk, and none were audio files so I used my extensive bag of tricks and ran scan disc, disc clean up, poked around msconfig, and the device manager like I knew something. Once all that was exhausted I was really lost (sorry aint it) I went into folder options to see if I could figure out what a .cda file was and if I could just re-associate the extension. The only .cda was associated with winamp. So I started trying more discs that were laying around, one other that I had burned for them and two free CompuServe discs with the same out come, long load times and showing the right size until you explore them and then you get a 44kb .cda file. The CDs that I burned for them are recognized in both my computers running windows 98, 98se. One culprit in my mind could be the real one player they just installed, I have yet to hear anything good about that program. but I really need help, is it just a matter of re-associate something or a hardware problem with the CD-ROM, how can I do further diagnosis?

All help will be greatly appreciated,
George