Actually, Acer did suggest a workaround to my OD problem, the same workaround that is found in the Microsoft Answers win 7 forum. Which is to clean some upper and lower filters in a specified registry value. However, for those of us that dont like to diddle with regedit, Acer recently came up w an application that does the job. This application was not included on the Acer Win 7 upgrade disc. As melvinpd wrote in MS Answers:
go download OpticalDrive PM Application from the downloads part of the acer website for your version of windows 7, install, reboot, and voila. maybe the windows workers could have spent less time with their amazing new 3 features (OMG "SNAP" we are now out of the dark ages.....) and a little more time making things work right to begin with as advertised.
It worked for my Aspire 4810TZ at least