My cd and dvd drives power up during the post and open when the button is pressed but they do not run cd's and do not appear in My Computer. They are in device manager but only the cd drive reports it is working. The dvd has a ! and reports no driver.
I have deleted both in Device Manager and rebooted. It appears that windows sees both devices as new hardware and installs drivers, but the problem remains.
Any suggestions would save what little hair I have left at this point

One common cause for that exact problem, and the fix:

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.

Some people have needed to reboot after deleting the registry entries, others have not.

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