DVD drive behaving oddly

Well, my DVD drive has been behaving oddly of late. I use it mostly for audio playback with my aging but still great CDs and occasionally for trying to make a bootable DVD ISO. (So far, no luck.) But after the system goes to sleep and reawakens the drive is invisible and cannot be used without rebooting. After reboot it takes about a minute (with a disk loaded) to be recognized, after which Winamp takes over and the music plays. The system apparently does not recognize blank DVDs, which makes using them awkward.

That's part of the problem. The other part is that, somehow, I have acquired a drive (E:) CD Drive. This is not listed in diskmgmt.msc but appears in File Explorer and Total Commander. Clicking on it produces a "drive not found" message. The normal (J:) DVD RW DRIVE - Audio CD Is present.

So 1. How can I tame the DVD drive to respond to a disk after sleep?
and 2. How can I get rid of (E:) CD Drive?

I ran Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:wim:G:\Sources\Install.esd:1 and SFC /scannow successfully.

Yes, I am trying PowerISO. Good call.

I expected to see the drive containing the blank disk. If the system can't see the drive it won't write to it. Will it? I have tried to burn to a blank disk only to get a "no drive found" error comment. However, if there is already an audio cd mounted and I substitute the blank disk the system will see it.

1703 / 15063.608

Autoplay works after a reboot. Right now there is an audio cd in the drive and the drive is invisible to File Explorer. I will now reboot with the cd in the drive . . .

. . . The drive was visible after reboot. It didn't autoplay but so what. Context menu offered "Autoplay" and "Play." Hit autoplay and Winamp; Winamp started up but failed and had to restart it. Now playing Harpsichord Music of 18th Century France. Fantastic. Will now eject and enter another CD . . .Dvorak, Slavonic Dances. Autoplayed ok. Now will put PC to sleep . . . Woke up and started playing again. Removed CD. Drive fell off of File Explorer but remained visible in Total Commander. Reinstalled Cd and it autoplayed.

I can't make it fail -- but I'm confident that it will. I'll try to note when and why.

It happened again. This time I was away from the computer for a couple of hours. I put it to sleep when I left and when I returned the DVD was missing even though there was a CD mounted. I wonder whether a longer time of sleep produces some deeper kind of sleep.

Spunk, thanks for the lead. I'll follow it after dinner.

spunk, I looked at your reference and noted at the bottom "This method should be used on Windows 7, Windows 8 or 8.1, or Windows 10 version 1507. The issues fixed by this method shouldn't occur in Windows 10 1511 or later." I'm using 1703. I think i'm getting into deep water here. some really strange things are happening:

Suddenly, I cannot bring up the Recycle Bin. Clicking on the desktop icon does nothing, though right click brings up the context menu. I was able to set it up in File Explorer, with the help of an add-on favorite files utility (Actual Windows Manager). I am going to try removing some of the more recent programs, such as PowerISO and see what happens. Failing that I'll try a previous restore point.

I'm reposting to this thread rather than opening a new one. Here's what's up: I did a system restore to earlier this month and the results were good. A lot of crazy things were corrected. Even the DVD played without complaint -- for a while. Now it will only work after a reboot or a long sleep period. And then only for about 3 minutes. It just disappears. I suppose I could get a usb DVD drive but what happened to this 2-month old computer?