From this point, the Blu-ray drive will be missing from the system completely and I will have to reboot to get it back.
This piece would indicate that the issue isn't with MC, but with:
* Faulty SATA/IDE drivers on the system
* Faulty hardware (either broken, or not conforming to the spec).
The fact that iTunes and WiMP can use it isn't directly relevant because MC rips discs differently than they do (especially in Secure Mode, which is what you should be using). But, in any case, the fact that the drive is vanishing from your system means that the driver for the drive is crashing. MC can't do that (if the driver is broken, certainly, but nothing MC can do
should cause the driver to crash, and if it does, then it is the driver's fault, not MC's). It might be more of an interesting test to see if EAC can rip from the drive, but it still wouldn't tell us very much.
My guess?
The SATA driver on your system is falling down. It could also be this driver getting in the way:
ELBY CLONEDRIVE SCSI CdRom Device (driver 6.1.7601.17514)
But, before I tried that, the first thing I would try is updating your Intel Rapid Storage drivers. You're on:
Intel(R) 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller (driver 12.8.0.1016)
That's not absurdly old, but it is from March 2013, and there have been a couple updates since then (currently 12.9.0.1001 from 12/2013). If that doesn't work, try uninstalling CloneDrive and see if that makes it go away.