dvdrom drive and audio stutter even when not using the drive.

Ok so heres the deal, this has been going on for some time and while I have a work around, it still nags me and wonder if anyone else had this issue. I'd rather not replace the dvdrom if I didn't need to but would be more then happy too if I knew it would fix it.

So here is the issue, It seemed to have first shown up like 2 year ago (so 2 years after purchase) and it seemed to coincide with the time I used Imgburns firmware update feature and it located a newer firmware that I then flashed. (the drive is a tsstcorp tsl462c fyi) It is however possible that it is a problem with windows vista or 7 (I run 7 now) simply because I am using windows default drivers as the laptop (e1505) doesn't actually have native or up to date windows 7 drivers. So it could possibly just be the dvdrom driver.

So to describe the issue... having the drive and its driver "online" (it doesn't need to be spinning or in use) causes a brief and rapid audio stutter on any music or movies playing about every 3 minutes. It is not a stutter caused by any read errors or slow speeds from the dvdrom as I don't even need to be playing anything from it to get the stutter. It is not a system wide or video stutter, it just effects the sound. Now the thing is, if I disable the dvdrom in device manager and reboot, it never happens. This is why I have lived with it so long, I just run most of the time with the driver disabled, but any time I enable the driver the stutter comes back. Also disabling it without rebooting lower the frequency of the stutter but does not stop it entirely. This has been quite hard for me to search on because most stutter queries relate to dvd read issues, drive performance, and other hardware failures that effect the PCs performance.