I have been following this since oldman came on board to try to root out any possible malware. I'm convinced (as he is) that this isn't some autoPlay virus as the symptoms of the autorun.inf infection simply aren't there.
Disabling the autoplay on the CD drove removes the symptoms you were getting, but that then takes us into why they were happening in the first place.
There would really have to be a CD in the tray for the windows autoplay function to kick in and then an autorun.inf file on it to launch any programs.
Now if it were failing hardware or driver it might indicate that there is a CD in the drive and autoplay tries to run but cant find any files so can't make an association as to what to run. However, with autoplay disabled and you put a CD in the drive it won't start to play as before, you would normally get a pop-up with options.
I have just put a media disk in my CD drive and I get a pop-up asking what to do, see image. I think you should have got that also (As the autoplay is disabled.) ?
From there I chose which Media player to use in my case Windows Media Player and it started playing, if however you choose a media player that doesn't support the media you have on the CD/DVD it will fail as it doesn't the codec necessary to play the media. As you have mentioned iTunes it will use a proprietary media codec that isn't available in WMP.