DVD drive stopped working on Gateway laptop...it wasn't hardware!

A friend of mine gave me his Gateway laptop to fix because the CD/DVD drive had stopped working. Naturally I assumed it was a bad drive, but I checked it out first by inserting a disk, which did not autorun. Then I realized, as I tried to navigate to the drive in Explorer, that it wasn't even present on the system.

A trip into the Device Manager showed that the device had a caution mark on it. I deinstalled the drive, rebooted, and reinstalled the drive, but it still was no good.

Yep, must be a bad drive right? It isn't even recognized by the system! But then I found this Microsoft document, which talked about removing the UpperFilter and LowerFilter for the drive in the registry.

I did that, and poof, the drive magically started working again. I wish I could remember the entire model number of the drive, but all I can seem to recall is that it was some variant of a TSSTcorp CD/DVD TS drive. I also don't know the model of the Gateway laptop...but it did have a 1.7Mhz processor, 1Gb of memory, and ran Vista so slow that I thought I would pull my hair out waiting on that thing to do any mundane task!!!

I hate Vista and have been using Windows 7 since it was released in January. I have 2 official copies pre-ordered from newegg for the Oct 22 release.