Well, I did reboot but it came back.. none of the keys were stuck.. what I noticed was that when I hit the right shift key, the drive ejected.. I think it has something to do with xmms cos my eventual solution was to start xmms immediately after closing the drive.. so now, even after xmms is closed, the drive behaves fine..Does this persist over a reboot? If not, maybe the key that initiates the eject (using something like acme, ikeyd, ... ?) was 'stuck', either physically or due to the infamous kernel bug, and kept autorepeating?
A related problem I think is that when the ibook comes back from sleep (i.e. after I open the lid), the CD keeps on spinning until I open the drive and then close it back.. a more recent problem (after the "auto-eject" problem above) is that after I close the lid and put the ibook to sleep, the CD starts spinning causing the ibook to wake up.. so something weird is definitely going on with the CD drive.. and I don't know what it is that I did that triggered all this.. :-(
Thanks, nirmal