>Larry, now hear this ...
>
>At home I'm on a (non-networked) W2K, and last weekend I stuffed in a CDWriter and the week before a mass storage USB device (for reading (writing) multimediacards etc.).
>
>Thursday afternoon my wife pulled a bunch of photo's from the USB device to a folder on the PC's disk. I saw her doing it. I also saw the photos appear in the photo-"album", which draws them from the folder concerned. The last thing she did was removing the photos from the multimediacard in the USB device.
>
>After that the PC wasn't touched, apart from me working thursday evening on the PC's printing, which it didn't want to do anymore. I was removing and adding printers and/or printer drivers, looking at the event log and really no big stuff. I didn't use explorer (and dragging of files etc.) whatsoever, and the only thing I did was under Dos things like DIR >lpt1:
>
>Friday morning my wife calls me at work, about all the photos being gone, but one. This one photo was -a few weeks ago- additionally manipulated opposed to the others. So, though it was in the same folder as the others, it originated from somewhere else. At the time, it was photo nr. (say) 300, and after that some 50 more were added. So it was just somewhere in the middle.
>
>I told my wife to scan the harddisk for a photoname she was certain to be there before. And she found it ...
>
>The whole of the original folder was moved as a subfolder to a "strange NS6 folder", my wife said. No, not delta-c, but something she coincidentally didn't recognize, but obviously I did (Netscape 6).
>
>All the photos where in there, but one : The one which was left in the original folder.
>
>This morning I thought, let's share this with Larry, and so I do.
>I really didn't experience this before, and it really wasn't done by ourselves (I even think one can't do this by means of one drag-drop operation i.e. by accident).
>
>This is W2K, but probably similar to your NT4. It's just a stand alone machine with no fuzz. I have it for two years. What could have caused this ?
>
>a.
>Three weeks ago I put VFP7 on it. I use it for very small testing with one pro
>gram calling one other. It uses one file only with some 5 records in there.
>I won't believe this has anything to do with it.
>
>b.
>One week ago I installed MS-SQLServer-DE. I didn't use it from VFP, and only used the analyzing tool that comes with it.
>It could interfere, but I don't believe that.
>
>c.
>Last tuesday I started an Internet connection with the SQLServer2000 at the office. Not from VFP but via the Analyzing tool.
>Can't believe it has anything to do with it.
>
>d.
>Last sunday I installed the CDWriter (from an older PC where it worked), and at putting in a PacketCD formatted CD, "Bill" asked me to install the PacketCD driver from W2K. I replied Yes. It took the remainder of the sunday afternoon to let the PC reboot normally again. It needed the manufacturers' PacketCD driver (Plextor) ...
>I expect this may have to do with it ...
>
>e.
>Because of 100 times boot-attempts and all being rather slow, sunday evening I started Defrag ...
>This obviously can cause anything.
>
>f.
>Tuesday I noticed that the PC wouldn't print anymore, which I haven't been doing since sunday morning. The PC was rebooted several times before it became thursday afternoon when the photos were downloaded from the USB (hence, the defrag should have come up earlier with missing things if that had caused it).
>Thursday evening the PC was rebooted again several times, and somewhere there it could have happened ...
>
>g.
>After installing the CDWriter at sundays, and when all didn't work anymore, I examined the registry, and found it was rather messy around the Mounted Devices. I found several inconsistencies between the (two) CD devices and the USB mass storage device (containing 5 removable media). E.g. the Dos devices (drive letters) weren't consistent with the Win-devices, and some more things I interpreted as wrong.
>This sure doesn't look good, and I suspect the USB device not to be that decent.
>In the end I solved this by removing all software from the USB device and the CDWriter, then installing the CDWriter software and the USB mass storage software, in that sequence. This was at sundays.
>
>
>As you can see, in the end quite a few things were done to the PC before the folder started moving, and I'm sure one of them influenced it. I mean, it hardly can be a coincidene that where I never saw such thing, now it happened.
>Above kind off brainstorm leaves me with two major causes :
>1. The defrag (but which was 4 days earlier with many reboots after that.
>2. The USB mass storage device, and the last action of deleting the photos from the MMC (hence after that nothing was checked in the PC again).
>After this the PC was rebooted serveral times (getting the PC to print).
>
>That the PC won't print anymore must be caused by or the install of the CDWRiter, or the defrag, or the install of the CDWRiters' drivers, which btw are removed again right now. And it still won't print.
>
>Larry, let this be some outlet of frustration (have to buy a new PC in order to print again, it seems), but possibly you recognize some of it.
>

Peter, the easiest way to avoid having the removable media USB device cause a great deal of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling is to assign your CD devices to drive letters outside the normal range of device assignments. Having run into this kind of problem with TapeToDisk, which, when loaded, makes my 4mm DAT appear as a disk device, and as a result, having it 'bump' my DVD and CD-RW to new letters with characteristics that were not the ones I wanted, I moved the DVD and CD-RW devices out of the normal stream of drive letters; the DVD is now drive R: and the CD-RW is now drive S:. No more problems have occurred with intermittently loading TapeToDisk. I had another friend who had a removable USB hard drive, who also had similar problems; moving his CD-RW drive up to I: (before, his drive letters ended at either F: or G: depending on whether the USB drive was attached and turned on), and adding a Zip drive didn't cause problems for him later.

Just a SWAG, but it's worth a try.