I bought a computer last year for my kids, so they can leave me to sleep when playing games in the morning.  It is a good computer and only set me back 500$.  For a while we used it for watching videos and that was good, because our DVD player was busted.  However, in the time we were watching movies that we rented, our computer got loaded with a program that completely disabled the DVD/CD Drive, so that we could not find it on our system.  It really sucked for 6 months.  We were forced to buy a DVD player for our old TV, and couldn't load ANYTHING onto the computer via CD/DVD.

So every time my kids got a free game in their cheerios, we couldn't play it. 

So I finally got fed up and was like, whatever, I think I have an answer to bypass this problem.  I have a computer running Windows Vista in my room that is the primary fileserver for our local network, so I decided to make it's DVD Drive a shared device over the local network, so far so good. 

So I went back to the wounded computer, logged into the local network, found the Shared Network by using My Network Places > Workgroups > Find Workgroup Computers, Logged into that Computer and accessed it's Shared DVD Drive.

Now I am on the wounded computer that cannot load anything from it's DVD Drive and am accessing the DVD from my Shared Network drive.  If you wanted to just sit back and enjoy, I don't think this is exactly the answer, because you will spend too much time running back and forth from one computer to the other swapping discs.

Now, if you want to solve the problem there is an answer which is not really that intuitive, but makes sense.

So I  pulled out my Sony DRX 510-UL USB drive and hoped that I could plug it into the USB and have a workable drive, unfortunately Windows would not recogize it without the Sony drivers. So after wondering how I would be able to install the drivers for this without accessing a drive, i put the Sony DVD in the network shared DVD drive, the DVD I am loading is the stock Sony Disc which comes with their DRX 510-UL USB DVD drive.  It should include the drivers to allow my computer to recognize this portable DVD drive.

I loaded up just one program, the Veritas DVD.CD copier program, which i wanted on there anyways.  I was never prompted to install any drivers.  I deselected all the other programs i did not need.

Somehow, when i installed the Veritas fCd/Dvd Copy program, it fixed all my problems with the Sony Rootkit and my CD/DVD drive was found in wondows, and all was well again. We can now play games and load CDs on the builtin drive without needing the external drive, with no problem.  It is my assumption that they have included a bypass in all their installation programs, to bypass the rootkit code, and allow Sony software Codecs to work, but in the process it also nulls the rootkit.

I have not heard about this before, but it worked fine for me by accident to restore access to my Cd/DVD drive.  just install the Sony disc for the portable USB drive Sony DRX 510-UL