Well, there's an easy way to check if it's a region problem:
Download VLC (
http://www.videolan.org/), it's a media player that doesn't care about region encoding. Install it, and try to play a video disk. If it works, then great! If not, I'd try something more drastic, like what's mentioned above.
(** I'm assuming that the drive will accept disks, and just won't play DVD-video disks)