Vista - Audio CDs won't play - Windows cannot access the specified device

I recently plugged in an audio CD to listen to a lecture which I have done many times before. however, this time I got the message "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file."

The odd thing is that I can rip the track using Easy Media Creator. This puts the tracks on my computer and then they play just fine.

The DVD player seems to work fine. It does play movies and it does read data files on DVDs or CDs.

I don't know when this problem appeared.

I have rebooted and it still does the same thing.

The only thing that I can think of that has changed recently is that I tried to install an old Adobe Photoshop Home version and then had to uninstall it. There were apparently a lot of "shared files" that it suggested that I remove and I did. Did I inadvertantly delete something I needed?

Would appreciate some suggestions.
Alan

Most likely you did delete it. You take a chance of it deleting important files when it asks to delete shared files unless you look into exactly what files it's going to delete. The safer way would be to just leave those extra files, you'll just end up with extra junk but usually won't run the risk of deleting something important. Try a system restore, that might work. If not you can use a file recovery program to get the specific file back. Recuva is a free one many use, there are others.

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File Recovery - Home

good luck.

Thanks Aaron. Would you have any idea what the file is that I might have eliminated? I looked in the recycle bin and didn't see anything there that would have been erased that day.

I haven't tried a system restore yet. I need to back up everything first. I'm assuming a system restore can be undone if need be, right? I was surprised to see that Vista hadn't put in some automatic restore points like XP used to do. Kind of bummed about that.

I wonder if reinstalling adobe photoshop would put the file back if it was a shared one in the first place. What do you think?

Alan

Well, I assumed you meant some tracks that had been erased... if that's the case you can just try to find the specific tracks that had been deleted with Recuva. If it deleted some system files then you'd probably have a hard time trying to find exactly what the system files were out of all the files Recuva finds. I guess you could just restore all the files that were deleted in those last fews days. I would just try a system restore and hope that does it. You should have system restore points already made for the last few days at least unless you've changed any settings for SR.System Restore is set to make a point at every boot up and daily at some time I believe in the Task Scheduler by default. You can change this of course. Also, you may want to run system file checker as this might restore some critical file.
System Restore - How to
System Restore Task - Change Automatic Restore Point Schedule
System Files - SFC Command