USB flash drive not fully recognized - solved!

[VirtualLarry]

Having some problems with my current main rig. I transferred over my multi-boot OSes (Win98se, W2K SP2, and XP SP1), onto a new C2D rig, and in the process, had to do a repair install on both of them, such that I now have W2K SP4 and XP SP2.

Recently, I tried to plug in my 1GB PNY USB flash drive, and it was only partially recognized. I didn't get a drive letter for it, and no autorun prompt came up. If I look in Device Manager, it shows up as a volume (FAT32 / healthy), but no drive letter assigned. I had to manually close EXPLORER.EXE, assign a drive letter in D.M., and then re-open EXPLORER.EXE to be able to access the files on that drive.

I gave it the drive letter U:, and the volume label in EXPLORER.EXE was "USB Flash", and not the actual FAT32 volume name.

When it came time to remove the drive, I double-clicked "Safely remove hardware", and it showed a menu with only two choices. The "Generic Volume - X:" device was missing from the list. After I clicked "Stop", it did show three items, including a "Generic Volume", but with no drive letter indicated.

So I try this again, and then U: pops up, but clicking that drive in EXPLORER.EXE gives me an error message about unable to access that drive.

In D.M., the volume shows up, but again no drive letter. So this time I try to re-assign a drive letter, and U: is not available any more, so I assign V:. Start EXPLORER.EXE, and now I can access files. This time, the volume label is "New Volume" or something like that - the actual FAT32 volume name showed up.

Removing drive - same thing happened, only two devices showed in the list, until I clicked "Stop", then three showed up.

So I don't know what to do, other than I'm going to reboot as soon as I can and see if the issue sticks or goes away. Sometimes I've found that Windows' Volume Manager gets into a wierd state, usually dealing with CD/DVD burning and not flushing a volume properly, but I wonder if something happened with the USB stack, and the old volumes are still sticking around.

It's not the USB drive itself, because I've tried it in other machines, and it was properly and fully recognized right away.

Is this some known issue, or just obscure Windows' wierdness?

Edit: In this other system I'm on now, it shows up as "Removable disk" in EXPLORER.EXE, it didn't show up that way either time in my system. Hmm.
I'm going to try deleting all of my unused USB devices and generic volumes in Device Manager and see what happens.

Edit: No joy. Deleted all unused USB-related and volume-related items in Device Manager, re-booted, re-installed, still doesn't work.

I found something though, starting with the first repair install, and for every boot thereafter, I'm getting an error from the sptd driver.
"Driver detected an internal error in its data structures for ." Event Id 4.
I think that might be the problem, since sptd sits in the disk driver stack. I don't seem to have any problems burning DVDs with Decrypter though, which uses sptd.

Can anyone post what their HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\sptd registry key looks like? Specifically, is there a "Cfg" key, that isn't accessable? If it is accessable, can someone export that key and post it here? Mine isn't accessable for some reason, it's the only key in that entire area that isn't, and I'm wondering if my registry is corrupted. On my old machine (still at SP1), Cfg is inacessable as well, but I'm not getting the sptd errors in the System error log.

Could you also post the filesize, timestamp, and version of your sptd.sys file, and if you also have an sptd3373.sys file as well?

Edit: I just checked on a relatively recently-installed XP SP2 install, and there was no sptd entry as I mentioned above. So now I'm trying to figure out if this is an MS built-in driver or not. The machine was running Nero 7 Essentials Edition, so the driver doesn't come with Nero, because it would have been installed. Checked two more machines, sptd registry/driver not found. Hmm.

Apparently sptd is NOT the driver for SPTI, which I thought it was. It appears to be a seperate, third-party driver. http://www.duplexsecure.com/faq/

I found some info about USB drives not mounting with sptd installed but malfunctioning! See http://forum.duplexsecure.com/showthread.php?t=316

In any event, in this half-installed mode, SPTD caused serious USB problems for me. iTunes couldn't detect my iPod, camera software failed to see my digital camera, and my USB flash drive no longer worked. In essence, anything that would mount as a drive via USB no longer worked. XP still detected the device, loaded the appopriate drivers, and so on. It seemed that only the drive-like functionality was gone. USB devices like a USB->serial converter, USB printers, USB hubs, and so on continued to work unaffected.

Solved! I disabled the driver according to the FAQ http://www.duplexsecure.com/downloads/faq , and now my USB drives are working again! Yippee!