Vista - DVD Drive not recognising DVD-RW

I've seen this problem quite alot on the forums but they all have their own variation.

Basically I have my main PC and my laptop.

My main PC: Dell Dimension 9200
OS: Vista Home Premium
Drives: 2 disc drives, one is a CD-Rom, DVD R/RW, and CD RW, the other is a DVD Rom drive. (Though I don't think I've ever used the DVD Rom drive, most DVD discs aren't recgonised through it, they're recognised through the other drive :/)
Age: About 2 years

Laptop: Dell Inspiron 1525
OS: Vista Home Premium
Drivers: One which is a CD-Rom, CD RW, DVD Rom and DVD R/RW
Ages: Not even 6 months

I'm trying to move a video (about 24 minutes in length, an .avi file) from the main pc to the laptop. I would usually use windows explorer for this but it majorly packed in about ooo a year ago now. I would put in the disc and it would take AGES (we're talking hours) to format and then would usually freeze up and not even complete the format. About 8-9 months ago it stopped realising you'd put a new disc in altogether.

So I started using Roxio home creator. This worked great for my needs and was much quicker (btw I was putting video files on RW discs of about the same size as the one I'm trying to put on now). However for this latest video Roxio has decided to give me grief.

It would recognise me putting the disc in but would constantly have problems half way through the burning process and often freezed up top and I had to close it. One time I thought I had managed to get the file onto the disc and took it to my laptop, put it in but my laptop just recognised it as a blank disc.

Obviously I was now confused as to whether the disc was blank or had part of the file on it. Went back to main pc to erase, now Roxio is having errors during the erasing process of the disc. And I am STILL getting errors during burning.

I tried all this with another DVD RW disc got exactly the same problems. Now Roxio and the main PC AND laptop will not recognise the 2 discs at all. I put them in, I hear it struggling and then..nothing.

Laptop and main PC still recognise CD roms, music CDs, DVD, games and so on. Not sure about other DVD RW discs, I don't have anymore I can test.

So the arguement probably is that my laptop and pc have some form of vendetta against the two particular discs I'm using cos they've been used quite a bit (they're in good condition btw, no scratches etc). Thus I should just go buy another DVD RW disc and use that but ya know I had to do this last time my PC decided it was bored with my current RW discs (about 3 months ago); it's mad, they're REWRITABLE, I shouldn't have to be constantly buying them.

Discs I am using: A Verbatim DVD-RW (4.7GB) and a Kodak DVD-RW (4.7GB)

I've been to the www.support.microsoft.com/kb/314060 link and done the automatic 'fix it', this did not help, in fact it made it worse as Roxio now cannot detect any drives AT ALL. Also tried the manual fix but cannot get further than step 5 as there are no Upper or Lower filter files displayed.


So yes, what is going on here? It's just getting incredibly frustrating.



Other things I have tried:
-Burning the disc using Windows Media Player, this program isn't recognising the discs either and is crashing quite a bit.
-Splitting the video file using WMM so it's two 12 minutes WMV vids instead, thinking that perhaps Roxio could cope better if it was a smaller file. However the publish videos are just 12 minutes of black screen and no sound. Not surprised though WMM is a useless program.


NOTE:
I am not computer literate, I'm ok but please can you please make any suggested solutions as detailed and broken down as possible, thank you very much.