"Prepare this blank disk" in Vista

A few times recently I've popped a CD or DVD into one of my Vista machines, and it has popped up this message:



The only problem is... the disc in the drive wasn't blank. I've experienced this with at least two machines running Vista Business and Ultimate, 3 different CD-RW and DVD+/-RW drives, and at least a half dozen different professionally pressed CDs and DVDs -- so it wasn't a random read error or a dusty disc or anything like that.

Even more strange is the fact that I can "browse" the CD/DVD just fine from the command prompt using the good ol' dir and cd commands. This got me to the various setup.exe files that I was in a hurry to get to in the past, but tonight I took a few minutes to try to actually fix the problem.

Microsoft has a KB article that suggests some registry changes to the "lowerfilters" and "upperfilters" keys, but these didn't do anything for me.

The fix was pretty painless once I found it: just uninstall the affected devices from Device Manager and then Scan for Hardware Changes to re-detect them. It's a cheesy fix that should be entirely unnecessary, but it works, and it's easier than poking around in the registry.

I'd like to know more about the real underlying problem in Vista, but I'm not quite curious enough to track it down further since I've got my drives working properly now. If you happen to come across more information, please post a comment and let me know.