After all the back and forth with this issue, it came down someone the IT department doing something strange to the Windows XP Pro SP3 installation on the machine. The PC was purshased as is from an company auction. So who knows what happened. maybe it could also be a corrupted reqistery. Bottom-line, no CD-RW/DVD-ROM would work in this PC.
My solution was to place my spare 160GB ATA/IDE hard drive in the PC as the master device and use the Sony CD-RW/DVD-ROM as the slave device and installed Windows XP Home SP3. Once that was completed I checked the properties of the Primary IDE Channel which indicated UDMA Mode 5 for "device 0" and UDMA Mode 2 for "device 1". So this was not a hardward or BIOS issue.