Have you ever 'lost' your CD/DVD drives?

[Rik]

IOW, have they ever been yellow flagged in Device Manager? I had it happen, and the usual trick of uninstalling them, then re-booting and letting Windows detect and re-install them didn't work.

If the error message in Device Manager is "Windows cannot load the driver. The driver may be missing or corrupted (Code 39)".

In Device Manager, uninstall CD & DVD drives. Uninstall Primary and Secondary IDE channels under IDE/ATAPI Controllers - ignore requests to re-boot machine.

Go to Regedit, navigate to key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Look for the key which refers to DVD/CD-ROM drives. Delete the subkey UpperFilters, also LowerFilters if it is present.

Re-boot the machine. All should now be well.

The cause, incidentally, was Nero's InCD in the UpperFilters.

[sobranie]

The cause, incidentally, was Nero's InCD in the UpperFilters. ////////////////////////////////

I was a victim of InCD at one time.  Did not get as far as CD probs as my m/c flatly refused to do anything other than crash every time win xp had loaded.
Eventually Nero admitted the problem to me and countless others and re-wrote part of the drivers which (apparently) cured the prob and substituted another as per your post Rik.
I must admit that InCD is no longer part of my arsenal as I prefer to dump bits and bobs to my external drive and gather the requisite pieces to burn a full cd.

[Rik]

The only reason I have it is because I back up some of my data to DVD-RW each day. I might try the Roxio equivalent next - at least I know where to go and look for any problems!