CD/DVD Player Suddenly stopped wanting to burn CDs

For no apparent reason my CD/DVD has stopped wanting to burn CDs. No matter what I do it refuses to recognise any blank disk, even though I have been doing this regularly with the same brands for ages - until today.

The drives (I have two, a Pioneer DVD-RW and a TSST Corp CDDVDW) also stopped playing music CDs today at the same time but I got a Fixit from the MS site and they will now do this, albeit not properly. I.e. the drives are configured to automatically use Windows Media Player when presented with a music CD but they don't - they don't even spin up. If I manually open WMP and go to Menu/Play it says there are no disks loaded. But if I then just open and shut the tray the track list shows up after about 15 seconds and the disk will play ok. So things aren't quite right still...

I have been in device manager and right clicked on both CDDVD players and tried to update the drivers but in both cases it said the latest ones were installed.

Not sure where to turn now. I can't burn disks and can only play music CDs if I coax things gently...
:help:

 

After a bit more Googling I'm pretty sure this means Autoplay has become broken somehow. The question is, how can I repair it?