USB problem with external drive

[Jhieminga]

I would appreciate some comments on this recent problem: I've got a 2,5" drive in an external USB box. A few days ago I noticed that when opening explorer to find something on the drive, explorer seemed to freeze when I clicked on the USB drive. At first I thought the drive to be at fault (it's an old harddisk) but strangely enough the symptoms show up when I try to open my digital camera as a mass storage device as well! To complicate things further I can access both the camera and the USB drive with any program, at normal speeds and with normal results except for explorer. I tried scanning the disk for errors but that didn't help, ran Ad-aware and hijack this, all to no avail.

I'm running XP SP2 with automatic updates on, NAV 2005 and the normal package of Office, photoshop and other tools. I use Firefox as my browser.

Anyone with an idea about this?

[frostbite]

Might be interesting to get hold of a (free) copy of Power Desk 5, which you will probably prefer to Explorer, and see if that solves the problem.

There is a PD6, but you have to pay for that.

[Cornish Jack]

I suspect that it is the same problem as I had - it's always Explorer which isn't happy and the freeze continues until you either reboot or pull the USB plug. It dates (for me) from installation of a Belkin USB 2 hub, which appears to be OK in Device Manager but which generates constant "USB Device not recognised" messages for things like my ADSL modem.
I am constantly amazed at the apparent inability of this (supposed) leading edge technology to cope with some pretty basic software operations like USB and mainstream programs like Belkin and SoundBlaster. ....... Redmond ... and they really believe that people will shell out yet more dosh for their next digital disaster area!!
Anyway, Jhieminga, pulling the plug and retrying (several times) does work, eventually