RHEL 5 hald-addon-storage

So my RHEL 5 VMs started to show high cpu utilization on a few machines. I noticed that the even though top wasn't showing high cpu utilization vmware was. I saw that the hald-addon-storage was polling /dev/hda pretty often. I determined that this was probably the cause of the high cpu alert. So to fix this issue I went to my VMs shut them down and removed the CD-ROM drive from the system. I then booted the systems back up and waited for them to finish. I then shut them down again and added the CD-ROM drive back to the VM. This seemed to resolve the problem with the hald-addon-storage polling too often and my VMware system is no longer alerting on the high cpu utilization.