CD/DVD burner broken with 2.6.20-15

I have a plextor PX-708A CD/DVD burner and am running Feisty with kernel 2.6.20-15.

I went to copy a CD today and I found the following symptoms:

Kaffeine will not play the source CD - it crashes.
(It is also crashing when I try to play DVDs - that may or may not be related)
Sound Juicer will recognize the CD and download CD-DB info.
Nautilus CD Burner will read an image of the disc and ask me to insert a blank target disk.
It will then - evidently - write to the target disk; the status bar will fill up and so on.
During this writing the system becomes very unstable - other applications fail to launch, the input peripherals are severely lagged.
Nautilus CD Burner will eventually report that the writing has finished, and I will close it.
At this point I try to eject the drive using the "eject" command, and using the button on the front of the drive.
The drive will not open.
The system remains unstable as during the writing process - new applications won't launch, I can't get a terminal or any gui controls to shutdown the system.
I use <CTRL> + <ALT> + <BKSPC> to kill X hoping that I can get a terminal login
I can't login, however I see some kernel error messages dumping to the screen:

hdc: drive not ready for command
hdc: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown

So I hit the reset button.
The BIOS hangs up at "DETECTING IDE DRIVES"
I cut the power to the system and wait a few seconds, and then it will boot, and I can open the drive.
When I take the target disk out, a visual inspection does not find anything burned onto it. However, there is a TOC or something, because my other computers and CD players no longer recognize it as a blank disk.