Thanks for your help Spanner but no go. I also have a dual card reader for my digicam so I remapped the drives so that the card reader is E and F, the DVD is X and the CDR is Y. I've set the default drive to X in WinDVD. I've reinstalled WinDVD several times to no avail.
The jumpers are okay because everything is recognised in the control panel/system window. If I use the software 'eject' in Win DVD the drive works, so the software knows the drive is there. There is a funny though that in Windows ME there is no DMA box on the drive properties.