Before you do any of that you could check if the driver is reported as working correctly. If there are any problems with that driver there would be a yellow circle with an ! in it, if not it will be similar to my image, so the driver might be OK.
The driver is for the optical drive and not your laptop and I don't know if they might have that driver, did you not get any CDs with your laptop as these may contain all necessary device drivers. The problem being correctly identifying the exact model of optical drive on your laptop. You can go to the My Computer, System Information, Hardware, Device Manager and look for DVD/CD. That may give information on the drive model which you might be able to do a google search.
Well the only other option is to uninstall the existing driver and reboot your system, the operating system should then detect new hardware and try to install a suitable driver. This may not go as planned and windows might not have a driver and you have to provide one, so it is advisable to already have obtained one.
I also don't know if it is advisable for you to do this on your own as it could make things even worse and trying to talk someone through this on something like the forums is not good.
Lets assume you enable autoplay for the optical drive, how much hassle are the folders being opened ?
If you leave it disabled, then when you put a music CD, etc. you would have to right click the Drive letter for the optical drive in windows explorer and from that menu select AutoPlay. Neither situation is by any means ideal.
I'm honestly out of ideas as to why this whole problem is occuring but it isn't malware as you first suspected.