Package Management Tool doesn't recognize CD-ROM

[Jonathan Pool]

After installing RHEL AS 3 on a system with an ECS Elitegroup K7S5A Pro 
mainboard with an AMD Athlon XP 1500+ CPU and an Ultima Electronics 
DHM-G48 DVD-ROM drive, I decided to add some packages to the 
installation and ran the Package Management Tool 
(redhat-config-packages) from an xterm window. The tool behaved as I 
would expect until it finished obtaining my package additions, and then 
it said:

"Red Hat Enterprise 3 Linux" disk 2 needed to install packages. Insert 
the disk and press OK.

I did that, and immediately after I pressed OK I got another copy of 
that same message, and this continued indefinitely. Each press on OK 
would start the CD-ROM drive spinning for a few seconds, but the window 
would never get dismissed.

Experimentation revealed that, while this message awaited my OK, I 
could go to another terminal window and mount, read, and unmount the 
CD-ROM (as /mnt/cdrom, where /dev/cdrom is mounted per /etc/fstab), but 
if I pressed the PMT's OK button after mounting the CD-ROM with "mount" 
then I could no longer unmount it with "umount", instead getting an 
error message saying it wasn't mounted. Thus, it looked as if PMT's OK 
button unmounted the CD-ROM if already mounted.

I have searched the KB and forums for prior reports of this problem and 
found a few, but their resolutions don't seem to apply here.