explorer freeze, highly frustrating..

Hi, I'm trying to copy all my music I've collected over the past years from dvd to a harddisk. Some dvds are quite old, so my dvd-player has problems reading some disks. Okay, fair enough. But when a disk has errors on it, for some reason it's not just good enough for Windows 7 to mention that and stop reading, no, rather it goes on and on, lets explorer freeze ('does not respond AT ALL'), and there is no way I can close it, even from the task manager. This way it takes ages to complete this task... can anyone give me advice, for instance, is there a program that can even more radically close a program, so i can just restart it, insert another disk, and go on copying my files?

Thanks a lot for your response.

You can try bringing up the task manager by hitting control/alt/delate then shut the program down from there.