Is it common for the slot loading DVD+RW to stop working??

Here a few days ago I was trying out a new USB Sierra Wireless aircard and was having trouble getting it to detect half the time on my Dell m1330. I had installed the Sierra Watcher program and I think I installed an older version that wasn't compatible with Vista because I wasn't able to uninstall it afterwards. Anyhow, I decided to do a reformat and I had already done one previously when I installed the new Seagate 160GB 7200rpm drive that I purchased from Dell. When I went to do that I started having problems with getting the slot loading drive to eject anything when hitting the buttons and it also wasn't being detected by the BIOS at boot. I ended up trying to do the OS install from within Windows so I finally got the drive to fire up by searching for plug and play devices in device manager. I completed the reinstall and after that Vista didn't want to find the drivers for hardly anything. It couldn't locate the drivers for the hard drive, the IDE controller, USB devices, nothin. The slot loading drive also was still not being recognized when I would reboot and the only way to find it was to search plug and play in device manager. The only way to eject the DVD was to go to My Computer, right click the device, and choose eject as the touch button still did nothing.

Has anyone else had a problem with their slot loading drive not detecting and working? Anyone else have a problem with drivers not being detected for common devices when you did a reinstall? Maybe I just hosed the OS in terms of drivers when I did the Vista install from within Windows but that doesn't explain why the DVD+RW just stopped being recognized.