Dell :: Studio 1535 Eject Button

Recently (as in, the past couple of months), my touch-sensitive media panel has been having some issues above and beyond the common complaints of the sticking eject button. Don't get me wrong, it still does that, but it adds something new to the mix:

More often than not, the eject button does not function at all, even after it unsticks itself.

Once I boot up, it sticks like normal until I boot into Windows, then attempts to eject about 10 times, and then stops. However, most of the time, it will no longer eject when pressed after this. Touching the button will cause it to illuminate like usual, but the DVD drive does not respond, regardless of whether there's a disk in the drive or not.

Sometimes, it works just fine for hours on end, ejecting every time I press the button. Sometimes it starts out working, but I'll come back to it half an hour later and it will no longer function.

Also worth noting is that when the capacitive eject button does not function, neither does the Fn+F10 keyboard shortcut.

I don't believe it's an issue with the DVD drive itself, as I can still eject via software while this happens, by going to My Computer, right clicking the drive and selecting "Eject" (although this occasionally causes an instant Blue Screen of Death).

However, I don't believe it's a touch panel issue either, because I've had the entire panel and ribbon cable replaced by Dell, and there was no difference. Also, all the other buttons (volume, playback controls) work perfectly when the eject is not sticking.

I also doubt it's a keyboard issue, because this started happening with my old keyboard, which I later replaced with my current backlit keyboard, but the Fn+F10 shortcut still does not work when the eject button does not work.

With all this, it left me to believe that the only thing it could be is software, so I completely reformatted the hard drive, left no partitions intact, not even the Dell Recovery partition, and re-installed Windows Vista 64-bit from scratch, but as luck would have it, it was doing exactly the same thing within 30 minutes of loading Windows for the first time.

I am really out of ideas here. I just can't think of anything else that could possibly be causing this, unless it's an issue with the DVD drive itself, which as I said earlier, is unlikely because ejecting via software works. Also, Dell refuses to replace the DVD drive anyway after I sent them basically this exact same message, because they "do not believe that there is a problem with the DVD drive".

Any ideas on why this might be happening? If it were just the regular sticky eject button, I would not be bothered as long as it worked as normal once it stopped sticking, but this is not the case.