The mysterious disappearing CD Drive

Hello all I'm new to this posting thing,
I have a DVD drive that disappears from 'Computer' every time I restart Windows 7. I have spent 14 hours on this, and still don;t understand why. I have done everything that I have found on the internet and am no closer to understanding the issue. If I put a disk in nothing happens until I take the drive out and put it back in then it works fine and the icon appears in 'Computer' and device manager is happy again.

I can tell you what it isn't:
Its not the BIOS or hardware because it has worked seamlessly using Mint, my default boot option, for two years and continues to do so, on the same machine.
Doing all the stuff in regedit 4D36E965... upper and lower limits does nothing, those limits have never been present. Other stuff with a DWORD also made no difference.
MicrosoftFixit.dvd.run actually does make it work, but this is because it asks me to take the drive out and put it back in. It also reports back that the problem is fixed due to the disc it asks me to put in being unreadable, even as I listen to the music it's playing.
The driver is fine, at least Microsoft finds no fault when I right click the device manager DVD icon and ask it to look online.

One possible clue. I made it restore to a previous time, in November, and everthing worked as it should. I could turn it on and off and all was well. I thought I'd won. Then it updated itself without any permission and it all went pear shaped again. Perhaps if I turn the update mechanism off and restore to November I'll have a permanent fix, but I don't know how to stop it and can't find out how.

Once it's running it's fine until I restart and it's back to square 1. I hate being defeated by a computer, It's never happened before.

I look forward to hearing from the genius who can solve this, and I think that so does the rest of the computer world.

try disable device driver and re-enable it in device manager. Or attempt to un-install it then restart ur computer and wait for windows to re-install the drivers again (if it doesn't. click update driver in device manager and let windows search for the driver) (may not be quite as safe as simply disabling and re-enabling but may work more permanently if it works!

Thank you Gornot and realflow100 for your advice. I shall implement it the next time I boot into Windows and get back with feedback. Once again thank you for taking the time.

Gornot, I've already found the update manager and set it to 'don't get any updates'. I don't know if this is sensible as I'm new to Windows (I'm working on the 'if it's not broken then don't fix it' principle), but I'm also horrified that the computer has the discretion to act on its own. I'm used to 'sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade' and etc.

The computer in question is the one listed in the specifications you mention.