Driver Woes

Can anyone tell me why windows takes oem drivers and replaces them with their drivers, even though in a lot of cases they are older than the ones installed. I forgot to disable the windows update on non-windows items and I am paying for it dearly. I can't for the life of me get my dvdw back to the point where it recognizes disks. It says that they are all inaccessible, unless it already has something on it, the you can use it but you can't copy to it, at least I can't until I break out the NERO, but that is a PITA when you just need to copy a short note or something. Also for some reason I can't replace the driver with the oem driver at all now.
If anyone has had anything like this happen to them and have a suggestion (one that leads toward the repair of the PC) that might help I'd appreciate it. Hey Jimbo get off your duff and do some work..... christ there's two of you to handle the whole site..... you 2 need to stop sittin around eatin bon bons and spoonin.
:booger:neener:roflmao