A Bizarre Ripping Problem

Trying to sort this out for my cousin...

He has a laptop, (running Win7),  that was working fine until iTunes was installed. He hated it, as it wouldn't let him rip from CD so he uninstalled it using the Add/Remove Programs.
Since then when an audio CD is put in the drive, his ripping program, Power2Go (which worked fine previously), won't show any tracks on the disc. VLC Player WILL play the disc if you force it to but won't show any details such as number of tracks etc etc. WM Player won't even recognise that there's a disc in the drive, it does show in Explorer however.
It'll even play CD's in a player I wrote using VB6 and Bass.dll, but again won't show track details.
I've looked at it briefly, such as permissions and suchlike, and can't see anything that's obviously wrong. Everything else works though, such as burning data, audio, DVD etc and reading data and DVD, it's just the ripping and playing audio CD's.
Anyone got any ideas, 'cause I'm stumped... apart from removing Win7!

mini-mad wrote: ... can you not borrow an external and see if the problem still occers to rule out drive malfunction?

Sorry, should've put that in the post! Done that as well and the same thing, it will burn data, audio and DVD and read data and DVD. It's just this bizarreness with audio!

It's so strange...

Windows Explorer shows it as an audio CD in the drive,
Windows Media Player says no disc and won't play,
Power2Go shows there's a disc but won't show anything else,
VLC Player won't show there's a disc but will play it if you force it to open the disc but won't show any info.

All of the above software will play (or rip, in the case of Power2Go) all DVDs with full properties!

I might resort to a f****ng big hammer. That solves everything!