Thanks very much Ed. I will apply your advise.

If I only could print again (been working on that for 16 hours today, I'm dead) ... But that's something for another thread.

Peter


>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.