DAT Tape drive question

I have an internal DAT tape drive installed on a poweredge 2800 server running Server 2003 SMB.

I use Veritas to perform backups. The problem I am having is that everytime I finish a backup, the clean LED on the front of the drive is flashing and I am being prompted that the drive needs cleaning. I put in the cleaning tape and the light stops flashing and all seems good. I also reset the cleaning stats in Veritas. As soon as I run another backup, the light starts flashing again and I am prompted that it needs cleaning again. Can anyone tell me how to clear this up so that I will not have to use the cleaning tape everytime. The drive came with a CD that had some diagnostics on it. I ran this and everthing comes back ok. I see nothing in the Diag that would pertain to cleaning anyway.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks