I was working on my web site locally last night, fine tuning some style sheet code. About midnight, I thought "the heck with this" and shutdown my machine. I've learned to completely shutdown Visual Studio before I shutdown my machine. Unfortunately, the machine did not shut down. I waited and waited. Then I brushed my teeth. Finally, I hit the power button for three seconds and went to bed. This morning, when I powered on, I found these error messages:

This was not starting out to be a good Saturday morning for Labor Day weekend.

I spent quite a quite a bit of time researching Google and fiddling with Group Policy and Local Security Policy editors. (Whomever had the gall to call these things editors should be whacked on the back of the head a couple of times.)

I'll cut to the chase. The problem was Intel Desktop Utilties. It was corrupted somehow. I managed to get the program uninstalled. Now, I can access my CD drives and my USB hard drive. The only problem is that I am missing the CD/DVDROM Icon on the drives in the My Computer view:

While this is only an incovenience, it causes me to wonder what else is missing or changed? Is something missing that might be a little more important than an icon? Only time will tell.

Update:

I was able to fix the generic icon displayed for the DVD drives. Using regedit.exe, navigate to HKCR\Applications\explorer.exe\Drives. Delete everything underneath the Drives key. It turns out that Intel had substituted their icons for the default icon. The uninstall did not change the default keys, so the system could not find the icons and gave up, displaying a generic icon. Reboot your system and your icons are back to normal.