welcome to windrivers ctoro

First of all what windows are you using?

Second, what changed between it working and suddenly not - for instance did you do any windows updates?

Nero is not useless! However, if you have two lots of burning software on the same machine, there can be issues.

Have you got any packet writing software such as INCD installed? (this allows you to drop a file onto a cd and the computer treats the cd like a massive floppy drive).

How did your experiment go of swapping the hardware around?