I’m wondering if removing the device physically then from device manager, then plugging device back in might help. Windows 98 definitely had problems with USB devices and it seems problems persisted in later versions. Not sure about winxp but windows7 seems to be much better behaved.
I’m not sure what causes this, but each time you plug a USB device in, windows stores a unique ID. Thus if you normally plug in any usb stick it get assigned next drive letter say e:. But if you, for a particular device, re-assign the drive letter using disk management, windows will remember that drive number and always assign for that device. I need to do this for an external HD since I have scripts that reference drive number.
