Optical Drive will not Eject

XP has a problem with the optical drive not ejecting in a networking situation . This seems to be a problem that’s been going on for sometime.
If there is a restart of the computer, the optical drive will eject and then will not eject, again! It can’t be hardware,I have been down that road with Dell. It has to be the software.
My question is, chould an image be causing this when adding third party software when creating an image?