Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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Came home today, inserted a CD in my iMac that is running Vista + bootcamp and nothing happened.
Went to the device manager and I saw this message under my DVD drive:
Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)
Hmmm, did the driver uninstall/re-install etc. I even clicked "Check for solutions" half knowing that would do nothing (if it did, apparently searching the web for a solution was far more effective).
I remember something like this happening to me once on XP. I was about to re-install Windows, but I did something to the registry that fixed the problem. Sure enough I found this post in a forum:
Start Registry Editor (Start, Run and type in regedit then click) Find "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" (and "UpperFilters.bak" "LowerFilters.bak", if they exist) value under the following key in the registry, and delete it: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} Quit Registry Editor. Reboot.
Start Registry Editor (Start, Run and type in regedit then click)
Find "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" (and "UpperFilters.bak" "LowerFilters.bak", if they exist) value under the following key in the registry, and delete it:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Quit Registry Editor.
Reboot.
Guess what? I did that and it worked. What the heck? Why is this so darned cryptic? What is UpperFilters and LowerFilters anyway and why does deleting them and rebooting them fix the problem, something that uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers does not do?
Anyway, I suspect this same problem would have manifested itself in XP and that some piece of software screwed this up. But I wish that Vista could have helped me out here.
Update: Now I remember how this happened. I installed Photoshop Elements 5, tried it out, didn't like it, so I uninstalled it. Cruise on over to Adobe and you will read all about Upper and Lower Filters and that some kind of install process corrupts these keys rendering the drive useless.
Background information The UpperFilters and LowerFilters keys in the Windows registry store information about CD and DVD burning drivers. When you add or remove CD and DVD burning applications, these registry keys are altered and they can become corrupted. When you remove the registry keys and restart the computer, Windows refreshes the keys. Some applications may use a different burning driver than the application you reinstalled. If the other CD or DVD burning applications installed on your computer cannot access the drive after Windows refreshes the registry keys, you will need to reinstall those applications before they can access the drive.
Background information
The UpperFilters and LowerFilters keys in the Windows registry store information about CD and DVD burning drivers. When you add or remove CD and DVD burning applications, these registry keys are altered and they can become corrupted. When you remove the registry keys and restart the computer, Windows refreshes the keys. Some applications may use a different burning driver than the application you reinstalled. If the other CD or DVD burning applications installed on your computer cannot access the drive after Windows refreshes the registry keys, you will need to reinstall those applications before they can access the drive.
Wonderful. I love software.
The OS should not be this fragile IMHO allowing a device driver to stop working so easily.