UPDATE: April 9, 2003
If you are having this problem with the OFP: Resistance CD (not the original OFP version's CD nor the OFP GOTY Edition's CD), then be aware that there were some faulty OFP: Resistance CDs produced that exhibit this problem. If you have such a CD, there should have been a printed notice inside the box informing you of this problem. If you have one of these CDs ,the solution is not to run OFP from the OFP Autorun menu that pops up after inserting the CD in your CD drive. Instead you should start OFP from the Windows START Applications menu or from a Windows desktop shortcut.
If you do not have one of these faulty CDs or if the above solutions do not work for you, read on.
Before attempting to resolve the problem, if you've purchased the complete US edition of OFP Gold (not the upgrade edition), look here first.
This problem has been reported quite often. See this FAQ item about your CD drive's ASPI layer. This has resolved many reported cases of this problem.
If you're running Windows XP, you might be in luck. See if this Microsoft fix resolves the problem.
One OFP player has emailed me that what worked for him was to modify a BIOS setting in his MSI motherboard based computer. He changed the CD IDE CHANNEL option setting from AUTODETECT to NONE and the problem disappeared.
Here's another possibility. If you are running any Virtual CD device software or other CD-ROM tools, such as Daemon Tools or Nero's ImageDrv, try completely uninstalling them. Codemasters has also suggested that people try uninstalling PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
Be advised that some users are discovering that CD burner utilities, including but not limited top EZ-CD Creator, NeroBurn and CloneCD, have caused checksum errors and messed up their system's ASPI layer. This may cause problems when installing or upgrading OFP. What a bummer!
If none of the above helps, see this BIS FAQ item.