OK, here goes.

1) I installed Alcohol120% - everything was great.
2) I installed gamesxcopy - everything went wrong (never install both at the smae time)
3) I uninstalled gamesxcopy.
4) I had a strange virtual drive appear.
5) I disabled virtual drives in alcohol 120%

I now find that my CD-RW drive cannot read CDs (the disk spins twice but it cannot read any information. Also' none of my programs can read any information.

Theories

1) Virtual drives have fooled the computer into thinking my real cd-rw drive is a virtual drive (it is on D: ???).
2) I have heard talk of reinstalling ASPI??? More info please.
3) Could this be a strange registry alteration? Maybe I need to delete registry entries?

If you have had this problem please let me know how you get on.

DO NOT reply with anything regarding System Restore, Uninstalling/reinstalling cdrw drivers as it does not work.

"I would rather destroy my computer that reinstall it again...and again...and again...and again...............................................................!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I am sure this problem is something simple...but what?

sometimes these programs install a their own aspi, overwriting your current aspi layer. when you uninstall the app they take aspi with them, leaving your system with no aspi layer. install aspi v460 from http://pioneerdvd.rpc1.org/aspi32v4.60.zip

Hmmm, after uninstalling Alcohol and Games x copy, I Put the ASPI in and have had no luck.

I have uninstalled the CDRW drive and reinstalled it, but everytime I do this It registers the drive to drive G: instead of drive D:. Now, I'm thinking this has something to with a virtual drive messing around with the system.

I need to know how windows XP handles the drive assigning (ie. floppy A:, Hard Drive C:, and so on)

I also neet to know hoe to FULLY uninstall a CDRW driver as windows seems to be recognising it from somewhere everytime it starts up (new device found, installing drivers, hardware ready to use).

Please help...

Changing Drive Letters in Windows XP?

When you add drives to your computer, such as an extra hard drive, a CD drive, or a storage device that corresponds to a drive, Windows automatically assigns letters to the drives. However, this assignment might not suit your system; for example, you might have mapped a network drive to the same letter that Windows assigns to a new drive. When you want to change drive letters, follow these steps:

Right-click My Computer, and then click Manage.
Under Computer Management, click Disk Management. In the right pane, you’ll see your drives listed. CD-ROM drives are listed at the bottom of the pane.
Right-click the drive or device you want to change, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Click Change, click Assign a drive letter, click the drive letter you want to assign, and then click OK.
You will not be able to change the boot or system drive letter in this manner. Many MS-DOS-based and Windows-based programs make references to a specific drive letter (for example, environment variables). If you modify the drive letter, these programs may not function correctly.

No results...

To get rid of the Virtual Drives and reg entries go into Alcohol and make sure 0 Virtual Drives is selected in the options menu. Then uninstall Alcohol. At the end it will ask if you want to remove all reg entires.

ASPI install - http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=101614
I doubt this is it though.

Windows job is to find new hardware and install it at startup. No hassle o/s you could call it. This is called progress. The only way is to uninstall the drives and then install them before you reset the computer.