problems playing games

I have a strange problem. I have two computers, my nephew’s and my neighbors, that will not play games in the cd rom or dvd rom. one machine has xp home the other has 2000 pro. Dvd will play but the xp machine game wont even auto start. tried starting from install file, no go. But dvd will play in same drive. tried several games and all same result. windows 2000 machine game will install but need to use cd to play. when you put cd in drive and hit play get message saying cannot read drive E, where game is. Again music will play from same drive and game cd will play in different machine with no problem. Both machine meet requirments (hardware) for all games. Any ideas would be helpfull. both have Java VM, Winzip, Shockwave and directX.