System: Windows XP
Issue: My DVD drives stopped working! They showed up in Device Manager, but with a yellow exclamation mark on them. Windows said the drivers could not be loaded for them. It gave me this message:
"Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)."
Fix:
I had to change two registry keys.
I went to here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
And then cleared out the information for the keys "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters". You should be able to just delete the UpperFilters and LowerFilters keys.
Cause: Not sure. I believe I uninstalled some Virtual CD software (such as Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools), and Windows threw a fit.