There are a million people out there struggling with the Sims 2, which has stupid, customer-hostile blocks and guards against all sorts of CD-R software. The symptom is that when you run the program, it tells you to “insert the correct cd rom” (despite, obviously, having the correct cd-rom / dvd in the drive). By rebooting my system half-a-dozen times, I've determined that (at least one ) cause of the problem is the process tfswctrl, which provides “drive letter access” (DLA) and allows you to drag-and-drop files onto a CD-R.
On my machine, it was installed as “Veritas DLA”.