Help! None of my DVD drives recognized.

Hey there. I'm not sure if this is the correct sub-forum for this question, but I've been having some trouble with my DVD drives lately. My original internal DVD drive, a Samsung TS-H552B, suddenly stopped working and I got the dreaded yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager. After hours of trolling the Internet for compatible drivers to update it, it still refused to work. I figured no big deal. I'm planning on getting a new computer in a couple of months anyway, so I'll just get an external USB DVD writer as a stand-in until then. I purchased a Samsung SE-S224Q writer, plugged it in and lo and behold...same thing. It too has a yellow mark beside it indicating a driver problem. Thing is, the Samsung website indicates they don't really use drivers like that, only firmware updates. So I tried their firmware update to no avail. The computer will recognize the drive, just not actually have it function. For all I know, this could be something stupidly simple staring me in the face or perhaps a deeper problem. Is it the Samsung products or something to do with my computer be now unable to recognize any DVD drives attached to it regardless of how it's plugged in? Sorry for the verbal diarrhea, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Does the drive simply not work? Or do your drives no longer shows up in My Computer?

With Windows XP I used to have a problem every now and again where my 2 DVD drives would suddenly no longer show up with Drive letters. (i.e. Drive D, E, etc).

There's a fix for it (It's a Windows Bug) on the Microsoft troubleshooting site.

OK. I jumped the gun a bit. I ran the registry cleaning utility which fixed the problem of the computer not recognizing the drives, but now there is a new problem. Both drives can now read CD's and DVD's, but when I try to write files to them on a blank DVD through Windows Explorer (like I used to be able to do), it only recognizes the blank disk as a CD and refuses to write to the disk. I tried Nero Speed Utility and it seemed to be able to burn it's test files to the DVD as a DVD, so I'm wondering if it a problem with Windows Explorer. Again, any help would be appreciated. Thanks.