Vista - Easy Fix for Player not working

I want to help out but be aware I am no MSCE not even close. I have a pre installed Vista Ultimate X 64 from HP on a Dr9260nr laptop dual core media center computer.
My media player 11 stopped working after I got an update. Like most people I know enough to get in trouble and so I started trying all kinds of fixes. Codec ,regestry repairs everything I could think of but none of them worked. Short of a system restore I did not want to do ,I was lost.

Yesterday I went into the (device manager) clicked on the DVD/CD and opened it to see my drive which was a Toshiba TS802A ATA. I clicked on it and removed the drive with the delete button. I then restarted the computer On restart the CD/DVD player factory driver was reloaded. Then I went to the (default settings) in the control panel and set everything to run on the Media center. The defaults took three times to get them to stay I kept going back and checking and they would change back to what ever they had been defaulted to. In some cases it was not media player finally it stuck. So after several tries with the defaults everything started to work again and all seems to be good for now. Hope this helps someone. The Forum needs a dummies section where I can go hahahaha. Good Luck
Please note all my stuff was pre installed and factory no aftermarket equipment. So I had facrory drivers in my system restore for the device to find on the restart.