DVD drive causing recurring sound loss

I've been getting sound outages lately that are accompanied by my computer freezing. It started about 2 months ago when my computer froze when playing a game, and when I rebooted my computer, the startup was extremely slow, my desktop took at least 3 minutes to load, plus my sound wasn't working. My drivers were installed, and upon going to Device Manager, everything seemed fine. In Control Panel, it says 'No Audio Device".

When I tried to scan for hardware changes in device manager it froze and I left it there for 20 minutes with it still hanging, and every time afterwards, same results. I tried uninstalling my Realtek AC'97 drivers, but it too hanged indefinitely. I couldn't even disable my drivers, and using safe mode also gave the same results. Through great trouble and trial and error, I managed to get my sound working, but the problem would arise later that day or several days after. I lose sound randomly when doing something, even just browsing the web, and everything, even task manager hangs. The next reboot is slow, and until I can get sound working again, I can't shutdown my computer properly through windows.

I found that with doing a virus scan with Norton(I'm not in a position where I can buy anything else at the moment, so I have to use that), I was able to uninstall my sound driver with no hassle, reboot and everything be okay. After going through this several times though, an AV scan doesn't work anymore, plus I'm tired of waiting several hours. I went through the virus removal process here and a different website and I'm sure it isn't a virus or malware.

I noticed my DVD drive wasn't working one day(I hadn't used it for several weeks, before this started happening), so I unplugged it to see if it would have any effect on reinstalling my sound drivers. It did, all I had to do was reboot, leave it unplugged and everything was fine. But even with it unplugged, the exact same problem arose, and I can fix it by plugging it back in, rebooting it and unplugging it again, rebooting again. Sometimes it'll work with one reboot and I can leave it plugged in. Also, my login cookies are deleted when sound is working again; I'm not sure how these two things are related at all.

I've tried uninstalling my DVD's drivers, and at the moment I don't see what buying a new drive would do, since the problem can come up even with it unplugged. It works right now, my dvd drive, so I think it's only bad when my sound doesn't work. I couldn't do a system restore to a date before this happened, as I got some error message saying it couldn't be rolled back.

I've already made a thread in a different section about this a month back if you want to see the info I posted there:http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=242116

What else is there to try? I can't consider this fixed unless the problem disappears for a few weeks. Sorry if this sounds confusing, it's a lot of info to put in and writing isn't one of my strong points.

My computer: Compaq Presario SR1010z Pu027AV. Only upgrades was a ram upgrade and a new dvd drive about 2 years ago.

 

Now it appears that unplugging my DVD drive isn't helping it at all, anyone know what I can do? I haven't got sound now and I'm all out of things to try