Ok, here's another one for the empeg braintrust (seriously, Tom should rename this forum).

Again with a friend's computer. I mapped a network drive to the letter "F" on their Windows XP SP3 machine,which was the first available drive letter.

Since that time they are unable to insert any external drives, whether they be thumbdrives or normal drives. In each case Windows will assign them to "F" - and if the mapped drive is active, the newly plugged drive simply doesn't show up.

If the mapped drive is not active (off for example) then the mapping is always visible in Explorer and any externally plugged USB drives will show up under that mapping. PLugging in a thimb drive will not cause a drive letter to show up in the physical drive section of myComputer and it will never show the name for the newly plugged drive. You need to open the mapped drive which shows the name of the network share to see its contents.

I have no idea what's going on. My solution was to map the network drive to "Z" to just keep it out of the way of any physical USB drives.

The wife is pushing to get a new iMac (for other reasons) and I told them that for what they use the machine for that they don't necessarily need a terribly fast machine and what they have (POS Dell with a Celeron) is certainly capable enough. Of course it would be nice to solve these BS problems.