disc drive problem

A friend of mine is having the same trouble i had with his disc drive that i had awhile ago, but i can't remember how i fixed it. what happens is the drive is listed under "my computer" but you can't double click the drive and run whatever disc, and no programs will recognize the disc. the main thing he's tryin to do is run NERO. I think what i had to do was go into regedit and delete one or more entries that began with something like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ahead\Nero........ Does this sound familiar to anyone?

First step is to go the Device Manager (right click MyComputer click Properties choose Hardware tab and click Device Manager). Find your drive, right click and choose uninstall. Then reboot (to reinstall) and see if that works.

that doesn't work