Hello,

My fianceé's cousin brought her notebook with her on a visit, because she had a virus (W32.Licum) which should couldn't figure out how to deal with, in part because it was blocking Norton's AV program from working. In the process of taking care of the problem (literally hundreds of exes had to be disinfected), we decided to get rid of Norton and replace it with Kaspersky. All's well on the virus front, but uninstalling Norton led to Windows Media Player getting broken (a known problem, and actually easily fixed, but it may be relevant for all I know).

Now, the real problem is that after we thought all was fixed, her kids wanted to watch Shrek 2 on the notebook, and unfortunately the DVD player (Hitachi GDR-8081n) won't read the film. It simply asks for a disc to be put in there, to no avail; CD-ROMs, however, are no problem whatsoever. After searching around, I find that there are very few options. Some suggest that the DVD must be given up for lost, which seems lame -- it'd be a really weird for it to go physically kaput at the same time as this virus problem, so I'm assuming it's a problem introduced by cleaning up the virus or uninstalling Norton.

Now, the GDR-8081n's don't have any specific drivers -- uses the generic Windows drivers. I've tried uninstalling it, but it just picks it up right off and reinstalls the present drivers. I've thought of perhaps hunting them down and deleting them, and reinstalling them from the Windows CD, but I'm not sure if that'd help. There's also a firmware upgrade available, but the description suggests it wouldn't have any effect on the problem.

Oh, and I upgraded WinDVD 7, since there was mention of the decoder possibly being at issue. That doesn't seem to have fixed it. (I don't know if it can read data DVDs, btw -- don't have any.)

Has anyone had similar experiences with this model, or, really, with any other DVD player? And, hopefully, figured out a solution?

Thanks for your help!