I now am able to see my BD-ROM drive and can use it for recording, playback, etc. I wish I could say conclusively that the regedit feature did the trick, but I can't. I didn't uninstall Nero or PowerDVD. I was working with Acronis Disk Director on some drive partitions and had to move between my dual boots of Win 7 and Win 8. After doing some things on the Win 7 side of my machine and returning to Win 8, the drive is now active.
Thanks for the help, in any event. I'm grateful that there are knowledgeable people out there who are willing to help.