I have sitting here a compaq presario 5000 series machine (gotta love em)....one of the 2 cdroms (on is a burner) shows up in cmos. and I can boot a cd from it. However whenever your in windows (xp pro)....neither of them are there. In device manager, one of the cd roms pop up from time to time with a yellow exclamation mark. I have tried the standard uninstall reinstall through device manager with little luck. Im guessing that some adware infection killed off the driver files. How do I get back what windows is lacking. As of now Im pretty sure that this is a OS problem, Im just not sure where to go from here. any help would be appreciated...im kinda stuck

An explanation and fix for the most common cause of what you describe can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q270008/

Although the article pertains to Win 2000, I've seen the problem occur with XP as well; the fix described for Win 2000 works for XP.

Please note that although the article only refers to the "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" entries in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet registry subkey, I've had to apply the fix to the similar entries (if found) in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet00x subkeys as well in order to make it work.

Just wanted to say thanks....that solved the issue...dang registry messup strikes again. I would have never found it without ur help....thanks DMR!!!

once again...forums prove to ROCK!!!

Yeah, that's a really obscure one, isn't it?

Glad we could help you get it sorted out so quickly.