In August I posted to the thread "Can't read CD-RW after burning them". I finally discovered the solution to my version of this problem.
I was getting sick of using a drive on another computer to read CD over my network and Fry's Electronics recently had Nero 6 Ultra on sale. I purchased a copy hoping it might solve my "can't read CD-R's" problem. Simply installing it didn't help.
The Nero Express which came with the Pioneer DVD-/+RW drive installs it's own ASPI driver, so I didn't think it was a lack of an ASPI driver as Nephilim suggested. The Nero 6 Ultra comes with all sorts of stuff not included with the OEM version, but once installed you have to download about of 50MB of updates to get things up to the current versions.
In the process of updating, I checked out Nero's extensive download site where I found the following:
From this page you can download a small application called Driver-Clean which as the page states "... Driver-Clean will deactivate drivers that caused problems in Nero in the past." I thought I would give it a shot. It found the following:
cdr4dll.dll, cdralw2k.dll and cdral.dll
A quick Google search showed these drivers are part of Easy CD Creator. I allowed Driver-Clean to remove these drives. I can't actually remember installing Easy Creator on this relatively new system, but I may have and it was obviously there once upon a time.
I also removed Adaptec related files and directories under C:\Program Files\Common. When I allowed Driver-Clean to remove the drivers I got a message saying Registry entries were also removed, but after rebooting I still found Adaptec related entries. Using regedit, I backed up the Registry (Registry->Export Registry File...) and deleted Adaptec related folders under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE. I didn't find anything under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE, but it would be good to check.
After rebooting, eureka, I could read CD-Rs again.
