bumping this up with the hopes of getting an answer and to add a bit of information.
It appears I was wrong about it only happening to cds with a disc.info on the root. It is mostly these discs that cause it but a couple seem to work without issue.
Is the cd drive when this lock up happens making a noise like it's constantly spinning & trying to read something from the CD
If so it could just be that the drives optical head is slightly out of alignment and struggling to read some of your disks, which with some filesystems grind things like disk accessing to a halt as it constantly tries in vain to read the disk and can go into an endless loop bringing all access to the disk to a halt including a lot of the time access to the HD...
