unable to write to or format cd with Roxio Creator 5 Platinum

I get this error message when I try to format my cd.Here it is
Illegal start block address (0x400004b) You will not be able to read and
write to the disc through drive letter access."

I have searched through the posts on Google groups and this problem has been reported over the past 5 or so years.Nobody that I can find has been able to find an answer!
To me it is more than academic as I have already lost a lot of files that I backed up to one of my cds and the other will only read although it is a CD-RW disk.
Other new cds I bought will not let me write to them either (access denied)
My system is Windows ME and my CD player is TEAC CD-W54E.I have 300Mghz,256Ram and plenty of HD space.
I had no problems with writing and reading for the past 6 months and now there is this problem .
When I open Device Manager I see there is a CD ROM listed but is that important?I replaced the original CD player with the CD writer 6 months ago and as I said ,it worked fine till now.
I have uninstalled Roxio EasyCD Creator Platinum ,gone through the registry to make sure it was all gone and then reinstalled (with a patch)but that has not fixed the problem..
Has anyone got a good idea as to what the problem is before I have to replace my whole system with something I can actually rely on.
thanks
Gary Davies