dvd player not reading

i've got an HP pavilion slimline the player is a TSST corp CDDVDWTS-H653NSCSI cd rom device. it came with the computer when i bought it about a year ago. so the problem is that the cd/dvd palyer wont read discs, whether they be blank cdr's, store bought music cd's, or dvd's. usually whenits working properly you here the disc start spinning quickly after an intial slower spin. now it just does the slower spin. when i open the drive in "my computer" it says "0 bytes" so its definately not picking anything up.
this all started after downloading VCL player to play some video files i'd gotten that my windows media player would not play. initially it played these files but now none of my players (realplayer, vcl and microsoft media) will do it.
ithe only things i;ve done so far are shut down the computer and re-start it and open the cd/dvd player info in the hardware/software section of my computer where it says there are no problems to report.
tany ideas???? thanks in advance, scott