I have x64 Windows 7 running on an ASUS M50VM. The DVD drive works completely unreliably if not at all.

But the story is not that simple so bear with me...here are the gory details.

When I first got the machine it came with Windows XP and I upgraded it to Windows Vista X64 and the DVD worked fine.

When Windows 7 RC2 came out I tried it on a Virtual Machine and I liked it so much that I upgraded the machine to Win7 RC1. The DVD worked fine.

Of course, RC1 was going to start spontaneously rebooting, so when Windows 7 was released I DID A CLEAN INSTALL of Windows 7. Just to clarify...by clean install I mean I did a FORMAT of the HARD DRIVE and INSTALLED it from scratch.

EVER since then the DVD mostly doesn't work. I can sometime read from disk but that will often hang. (Please see my description below of HANG for details.) CD or DVD writes ALWAYS fail with a HANG (I have done a successful write only one time.)

Here is what I mean by HANG...
*Explorer Window is unresponsive.
*Any software accessing the DVD drive is unresponsive.
*The DVD tray will not eject.
*Using a paper clip will eject but the disk is usually spinning real hard.
*Attempting to shut down windows will fail. I have waited as long as ten minutes but the whole OS seems to hang. I do a hard shutdown.
*Sometimes accessing the DVD (when it does not cause a HANG) will still fail and the device will actually seem to disappear from the system until I reboot.

A couple of other things. It is NOT a hardware failure. It is the Windows OS. I know this because I swapped out my DVD drive with a friend with the same model...his machine is fine (he is still running Vista X64) and my machine still fails.

For what it is worth. I swapped out my primary disk with the INTEL 160GB SSD.

EDIT

Here is what System Information shows about my DVD drive

Drive   D:  
Description CD-ROM Drive  
Media Loaded    No  
Media Type  DVD Writer  
Name    HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50N ATA Device  
Manufacturer    (Standard CD-ROM drives)    
Status  OK  
Transfer Rate   -1.00 kbytes/sec  
SCSI Target ID  0  
PNP Device ID   IDE\CDROMHL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GSA-T50N________________RR04____\5&2B5B7F1D&0&1.0.0  
Driver  c:\windows\system32\drivers\cdrom.sys (6.1.7600.16385, 144.00 KB (147,456 bytes), 7/13/2009 7:19 PM)   

Any ideas?

HELP!

Seth B Spearman