My DVD/CD drive doest recongnize CDs in Windows

I rebooted the machine and I still have the same problem
First I wanted to find out if the problem was software or harware. On way to test that is to boot into Linux and test if I still access the drive, the other option was a simple, I used one of Nero's Tools and it could test the drive speed, get the name of the disk and other stuff. This confirmed that the problem is software and not hardware ( just to be really sure that the problem is software I could boot into linux and test it out). Next was to find out if anyone had the same problem so I started googling.
I got this site a guy on this forum talks about the drivers that are loaded into windows and a tool that can display the device drivers load order for different drives. So I downloaded and executed the program 'Filter Driver Load Order'. My NEC DVD drive had the following information
1. Upper Class Filter - GEARAspiWDM - Gear Software
2. Upper Class Filter - redbook - Microsoft
3. Device - the actual device
4. Lower Class Filter - Pfc
5. Lower Class Filter - PcHelp20
6. Lower Device Filter - imapi

The only thing standing out was GEARAspiWDM, since this wasnt supplied by Microsft.
This is the first time I am hearing about a software from Gear, so who installed it?
On Googling for sutff realted to GearAspiWDM I found this article , It seems that there are certain 3rdParty applications that install the GEAR drivers, like iTunes - I think I just updated to the latest version of iTunes a while back, I just need to remember if the last time I used the drive was before of after that time(I still dont remember). I downloaded and installed the latest version of iTunes on the 26thJan, I also looked into the iTunes installer and noticed that it comes with Drivers.cab and bingo this file contained the GEAR drivers.

What is Upper Class Filters etc?
I could find more information about this in the book
'Microsoft® Windows® Internals, Fourth Edition: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000' - By Mark E. Russinovich, David A. Solomon
I think I blogged about this a while back.

Is there a way for uninstalling it ?
Using this article I can possible manually uninstall it

What other options do I have ?
1. Download and install the latest version of the driver from GEAR
2. Find out if there is a way for
3. Uninstall iTunes and see if it solves the problem.

We will see how it goes.

Finally I manually uninslled Gear Drivers, and I restarted iTunes and iTunes came up with a message stating that iTunes was not installed propertly and it cannot import music from CDs, which is fine since I dont use iTunes for that at all.