Unable to play from DVD with Pro Tools SE installed

[pawood]

Last week, I installed Pro Tools SE and an M-Audio Producer USB microphone. Today, I attempted to play a DVD, but VLC media player and Windows Media Player crashed as soon as they attempted to open it. I uninstalled Pro Tools and was able to play the DVD as normal. It occurred to me as I was restarting that I should have tried playing local files in the player to diagnose whether the problem was in accessing optical drive hardware or in accessing the speaker output, but I've been using sound in my web browser without trouble, so I expect it really was disrupting the system from reading the optical drive.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening when I need to reinstall the software?