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[rant on]
Sorry to annoy you all, but I really need to give vent to my anger.
So I found the dreaded Starforce on my system (I don't know which game installed it)
So I found that my dvd burner was stuck to PIO mode instead of the regular DMA (slower, less reliable, crappy, almost useless)
So I found that Starforce was the cause for all this mess, while I was thinking about buying a new DVD/RW unit.
So I removed Starforce, I removed and resintalled the affected IDE channel and all is working fine again.