TSST CD/DVDW TS-H652L DVD Drive Problem

I had a near catastrophe today, so I decided to sign up here and shoot the day on computer problems! All of a sudden, my documents became inaccessable, so I rebooted, and then I could at least see the documents directory, but I noticed a foreign file (one named "%'s videos" I think it was) as the first file listed in documents, and my data files themselves were still inaccessable.

So knowing that it could be 50 or more hours of work to research the problem, that I might never find a solution, and that I might lose everything unless I acted fast, I decided to try system restore for the first time ever. System restore has a bad reputation among many technicians, especially the ones in India, and so I have been avoiding using it. But today it just saved me: my system was restored correctly.

Anyhow, I think the problem may have come about due to a bizarre failure involving the Sonic DVD Plus program that came with my Pavillion a1600n computer. For the last week, it would from time to time start installing itself. (All of a sudden, windows installer would kick in, out of the blue). But it was already installed completely as far as I know. The installation would hang, saying that something was missing I think, but when you cancelled it, it would try to start installing again immediately. If you repeatedly cancelled, you could finally shut it down, but then it would start back up again in a few minutes.

I've seen many bizarre computer events, and this one definitely makes the top 10 bizarre list.

For a week, I decided to see if it would just go away as many bizarre problems do, but then today all of a sudden all of my data documents were no longer accessable, and about the same time the installer thing happened again. In general, things were going to hell in a handbasket and so I decided to use system restore, even though technicians I have had phone conversations with have claimed that it will never correct much of anything. They were wrong, the problem was fixed.

I have removed the badly malfunctioning Sonic DVD Plus program and hopefully the problem will not repeat.

All of this ruined my day, so I decided to call the whole day a computer recovery day and to work on a possibly related problem that appeared about a year ago, and that I have been putting off for more than a year.

My DVD Drive (TSST CD/DVDW TS-H652L) on my HP Pavillion a1600n (Windows XP Media Center OS) computer will not recognize fresh, empty, never used DVD+R discs. It will still recognize and play DVD+R discs that have data. It will still play Hollywood DVDs and CDs. If you pop in a never used DVD+R disc and look at properties, the drive shows up (incorrectly) as a CD disc, and it shows (incorrectly) no available space.

I spent about 1.5 hours reading related topics here, and it seems that many people are having even worse problems than I have with this device. For example, HailDarkLord reports that HP has little or no effective support for this drive whatsoever, and that reinstallation of drivers will not do anything except probably make the situation worse. I would not want to attempt to reinstall drivers right now, since my drive can still play anything, and I don't want to lose that.

I did in fact go to HP support and found a driver update, which I installed successfully, but that update has nothing to do with my problem anyway.

This DVD drive has two lasers apparently, one for DVDs and one for CDs. Both of mine must still be working, since both DVDs and CDs will play.

As described above, the Sonic DVD Plus essentially self destructed on my computer. I am at least 99% certain that no virus or malware is involved. The interesting thing is that Sonic was inferior to Windows itself for the basic task of backing up data, because it allows only "one shot at the apple," meaning that when you use Sonic with an empty data disc, you can only use the in one session. After one burn on to the disc, the remaining empty space on the disc can not be used for anything else! So the inferiority of Sonic and the self destruction of Sonic seem to me to be possibly related to the drive problem, but I have no where near enough computer experience to say for sure.

QUESTIONS
1. Is it possible that Sonic, considering that it is an inferior program with respect to data backup, and considering that it self-destructed as described, damaged my drive's ability to recognize discs and space available on discs?

2. Does anyone have any proposals for trying to get my DVD drive to recognize empty DVD+R discs and the space available on them?

3. Is it even remotely possible that the discs themselves are causing the problem (don't see how this could be possible).

4. Am I wrong about malware: is malware much more likely here than I am thinking?

Thanks to anyone who knows anything.