USB flash drive stick issues

[Mr Davo]

Hi, Today I bought a Cable & Wireless 128Mb USB 2.0 memory stick, to
transfer files from my laptop to my PC. No problem with the laptop, it sees
the USB stick, and saves files to it, which I can see again later.

My PC runs XP Home v5.1, with service pack2. If I plug in the USB stick, the
read light flashes and the PC makes a 'dung' noise (same as when it finds my
digital camera, which works fine through the USB port), it also gives me an
option to safely remove it. So far so good.

The fun starts when I try to open a file on the usb stick from an
application, which will crash while looking (or saving to it), or open My
Computer, which doesn't see the usb stick until you unplug it, when it sees
it fine, then doesn't any more because I've removed it!

There was a CD that came with the stick, there is a driver for Win 98, and a
utility to format the stick - I tried this but a box appears to tell me
there is no device present.

No luck with Google so far, can anyone on here help?
Thanks in anticipation,

Mr Davo

 

[bumtracks]

don't recall exactly but my first use on xpsp2 of a sandisk usb stick...

I went into the Management Console , Disk Management I think.
From there it was showing as something other, item 1 or something,
something other than what I thought it should & it was no problem to assign
it a regular drive letter, then it magically moved to the right spots
everywhere and all was fine. Now when inserted it always is that same
drive letter with proper removable drive description in explorer tree and
myComputer folder.