Surely you're not giving up, Hook?
I had this problem with a CD drive not so long ago. I would have sworn I had everything right. The jumpers, the leads, everything. In the end I took it all to bits and started again. I still don't know what was wrong, but it then worked.
Have you double checked the jumper positions, and made certain that the middle connector on the IDE lead goes to the slave device, and all that?
Something else which might be worth a try is to 'uninstall' all the CD/DVD drives in Device Manager, then let Windows find them again. I think you said they are all present on your boot screen, so maybe it has simply failed to install the CDRW, and has got confused with the drive letters? This is only a blind guess, but I don't think it can do any harm.