Problem w/ Vista and ALL storage devices

Vista Home Premium on a Sony VAIO laptop. Here's the deal: none of the storage devices work. The DVDRW, the SD slot, and the MMC slot. They all appear in My Computer with their correct respective icons, but that's it. If you pop in a CD/DVD nothing happens. If you pop in an SD card nothing happens. You can even have the DVDRW drive tray open, double click the icon, and all that happens is the 'please wait' spinning circle appears (the Vista equivilent of the XP hourglass) and that's it. The PC at this point is basically locked up until you use the task mgr to end the Computer process. The same thing happens when I click on the SD or MMC. It doesn't matter if there's a card in the slot, or CD/DVD in the drive, the PC just stops responding. The device manager is clean and all drivers are installed. The DVDRW drive IS mechanically functional 'cuz I can boot from it to any number of boot CDs. The owner of this laptop was very boisterous and assertive about NOT losing any of her data, including cookies (?!?!?!?). I guess she uses different passwords for just about everything and can't remember them all, so she has 'em cookied. Not a great idea IMHO, but whatever. So, how to go about this storage device issue?
:crybaby
Thanks.
:confused