Well, I'm back. I repeated the Device Manager thing and the Add Wizard thing and then I did the whole test thing in the Dell manual, which says all the system tests passed. So I went to another door to test the drive itself and it gave me an Error Code number and said that Dell Technical Support can help me, based on that number. The problem is that I think the number is based on the notion that I simply can't hear the inserted CD, rather than no CD Rom icon appears. So far I haven't come across anything that takes into account that it has disappeared.

I have (allegedly) uninstalled the drive but that's where I'm stuck. When I try to use Add Wiz to reinstall, everything goes swimmingly until it stops and informs me that it can't do it because the drive is "corrupted or missing".

I have the various re-install CDs on hand. When I put in the 'Drivers and Utilities' disk I was hoping it would magically kick the disk drive into action, but no such luck.

This is a 2004 Win XP system. One other thing I did in recent months that disturbs me is that I signed for 'automatic updates' and they have piled up alarmingly. Should I be doing something with that?