I've also had the same situation happen to me on a number of instances, and I can specifically recall two causes.

The first was that older games stopped working, and it was because I had games installed which used the Securom "protection" mechanism. If you have M2TW expansion or any other number of newer games installed, odds are you have Securom installed. It's known to conflict with other protection schemes, like Safedisc.

The other problem was caused by Starforce. Not only did that eat one of my optical drives, but it caused me numerous headaches with having other CDs and DVDs I owned not being read right. Removing that fixed all those problems instantly.

As for your drivers, them being system drivers isn't a problem, and given you how describe the issue I doubt it's your hardware's fault. It sounds like a classic case of game copy mechanisms conflicting with others. Of course it could be something else, maybe a virus or your hardware is honestly going bad, but that's not my first guess.