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I'm possibly losing my mind. My old ASUS drive is no longer recognized by Windows, so I'm assuming hardware failure. I just bought a new Matshita UJ260AF drive. I live in Region 1 and I'm trying to watch legitimately-owned Region 1 discs, but I can't seem to set the region on the new drive. Should be simple, right? It's right there in the drive's properties in the Device Manager. It's set to Region 1 with 4 changes remaining, but still I'm getting an error about a region not being set. AnyDVD also tells me a region isn't set. I've tried setting it to Region 1 when it's already set to Region 1, nothing changes. I've tried setting it to Region 2, again nothing changes, and it still says I have 4 changes remaining despite "changing" the region. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the drive several times. I've specifically run Device Manager from Command Prompt as Administrator and it still just doesn't work. No error messages about the change failing, it just won't do it. I'm out of ideas, Google just keeps telling me to do what I've done a thousand times. I've attached a screenshot showing the region set to 1 and AnyDVD saying it's not set yet. Should I assume the drive is bad and just send it back? Please save my sanity.

I applied alcohol to the situation and it helped. I found on another random post that casually mentioned you can't change regions while a disc is in the drive. While I had a Region 1 disc in the drive, the drive properties in Windows told me the drive was set to Region 1, but that was a falsehood. When I removed the disc, the Windows then said the region was "Not Selected" and my remaining changes increased from 4 to 5. Then when I set Region 1, it worked fine. A false description by Windows sent me down a long rabbit hole. I'm posting the solution here in case it helps some other poor soul.