For some reason, Windows Media Player is not seeing my laptop's CD/DVD burner as a burner, meaning I can't burn media disks. I can reboot into XP to do this, but that's kind of a pain. Does anyone know of a solution for this?

this doesnt solve your WMP problem, but its an alternative solution.
what if u try another burning software? something like CDBurnerXP (free) or Nero (30 day trial)
theres MANY others too, but they r fairly popular alternatives

Possible Solution?
have you tried to upgrade your firmware? I found a thread saying it solved his problem

As it turns out, running WMP as administrator made it work. Apparently there's some restriction which prevents regular users from burning disks. I'd think it would give me a UAC prompt for that sort of thing, but apparently it just pretends there is no burner. At least I got it to work! Thanks for the suggestion though