I built a new machine here a few months back. I noticed when I installed quicktime that it now came with iTunes. I typically don't do much music downloading nor do I own an iPod so I decided to can it.
No biggie...go to add/remove programs and select to uninstall iTunes. A couple of days later one of my kids wanted to play The Sims 2 and threw the dvd in. Nothing happened. She told me Sims2 wasn't working so I started looking and found that windows was installing the driver for the sony dvd writer AND for daemon mount tools but they both appeared to not be able to talk to WindowsXP. I checked the bios and it saw the dvd writer.
Played around with this for a few days. Swapped IDE cables, changed IDE channels, completely removed dvd writer, etc. etc. and then put it back to let windows auto-detect and nothing I could do made a difference. If I didn't have the same exact issue with daemon mount tools (a virtual cdrom) then I would've thought I just lost my dvd writer.
I started doing some searching and saw where a couple of people claimed iTunes removal hosed up their cdrom drives. I figured it was probably bullshit because the same guys complained about having to install iTunes with quicktime. After a few more frustrating attempts to get the dvd writer working I decided to re-install iTunes.
The dvd writer works now. Daemon mount-tools works now. Anyone else seen this behavior?
Removing iTunes disabled dvd writer
This bug is acutally well known if you aren't running service pack 2 on windows XP. Service Pack 1 and non-service pack machines will have issues with these drivers, as they do not have the newest information database from windows without service pack 2. Do some googling to see if you can find the driver database from windows without actually having to install service pack 2.
