Optical Drive Doesn't Work

This seems to be common—the optical drive doesn't work. I'd like to detail more symptoms, though, that might help form a real fix for those whom the solution at The CD drive or the DVD drive does not work as expected on a computer that you upgraded to Windows Vista wouldn't work, as it didn't for me (Upperfilter and Lowerfilter values don't exist in my registry).

Upon a clean installation of Vista, the optical drive works fine. After installing the whole slew of current updates, it stops working. I didn't figure this was a thread for the Windows Updates forum, though. When putting in a disc, the drive goes to work (illuminated busy light and the sound of the drive spinning) for a bit, then turns off and on continuously, freezing the computer until the disc is ejected. A disc left in the drive upon start-up will work correctly. Once I open the drive, however, that's when it no longer works, whether I load the same or different disc. So my question is, is there a way to fix this? Other solutions, like uninstalling the drive in the device manager and rebooting, haven't worked for me.