USB Pendrive letters assigning problem

Hi,
I had a serious problem with my USB pendrive. The problem pops up out of nowhere and I had no idea what could cause it.
I had a C: hard drive and D: DVD drive, so when I stick my USB pendrive it appears normally as E: Now when I remove the drive and reconnect it (put again into USB) it is assigned as F: - when I repeat unplug/plug it is G: etc. When it finally comes to Z: no more letters are assigned. I can go to drive management console and manually assigne the letter, but after this during unplug/plug letters iteration happens again. More than that if letters assigning stops at for example M: in drive management console I can't assign to it letter which were already used. There are simply no letters in combo box. It looks like after the unpluging of drive the system is not releasing once allocated letter. Please help - any ideas are welcome.

I'm running WinXPSP2 no HP Pavilion DV1000 notebook. Problem occurs on various pendrives so it is not the problem with it.

Oh, one more - after restart OS keeps assigning continous letters only this time in drive management console I can manually assign it to E: or other letters which are previously unavaliable.

Thank you in advance.

Before you physically remove the device, are you using the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the System Tray and then waiting for the prompt that it's OK to remove it?

Under normal circumastances not as it is configured for 'quick removal'. But since problem occurs I'm of course try that too. I believe this is not the problem as pendrives were functioning normally for months (this one as well as others). The only change since that is that I have installed SpywareDoctor - but I were trying to disable it and shutdown. Though - problem still persist - so I believe this is not SpywareDoctor fault either.

I've never read of a problem like this before. Interesting! (and frustrating right?)

I agree with SpywareDr in that it's a best practice to always use the safe removal routine, no matter how your pendrive connections are set up in Windows. Using the safe removal routine tells Windows to disconnect from the drive. Which is quite different from the drive is now suddenly gone.

It may not stop your odd pendrive assignment behavior but it's a really bad habit to just pull out a pendrive, especially if it's used on other computers (they may not have read/write caching turned off and your pendrive can EASILY be hosed.)

In case you are not aware of it, there are to ways to invoke the safe removal routine. One, you right click the tray icon, left click the Safely Remove Hardware, look for your drive, highlight it and then stop it. A much faster way is to left click the tray icon ONCE, choose the correct drive letter and left click it. MUCH faster!

One other thing that I'm thinking about is how often you reboot your PC. Do these pendrive oddities occur over the course of one day, or several? I'm probably not telling you anything new here but Windows needs to be rebooted. Programs with memory leaks and more just get things gummed up and a reboot starts everything fresh.

I'll look around for info that may help but at this point, nothing else is coming to mind. :)

OK we can assume that right now that I'm always use safe remove (althrough I'm disagree with you that it is a bad habit - since it is option for it in OS). As I write reboot changes only that in drive management console I can manually assign letters that are previously unavaliable /prewiously assigned to pendrive/ - just as C: or D: are unavaliable (since they are assigned to HDD and DVD drives). Where Windows is storing that information about assigned letters since this information is persistent throughout reboots?

I will very appreciate if you try find some solution or information about this issue. Indeed it is frustrating.

Big thanx in advance

PS.
If I find something new, sure will post it here.


edit:
I can reproduce this odd behaviour any time with any drive. So I believe that frequency of reboots has nothing to do.

Well, it looks like I have found the cause. It is caused by Spyware Doctor, I have mentioned earlier in my posts. It's just that disabling it is not enough. When I've removed (uninstall) it from my system the problem has gone. Also I was able to reproduce my problem on other computers just by installing Spyware Doctor on them. Right now support guys are dealing with this.
Thanx for your time.

Wow! I sure wouldn't have ever figured that one out! :)

Is this the newest SD version 3.8? Add another bug to the list for it. I used it for a few days but couldn't live with a 100% CPU spike every 15 seconds it generated. (At least it did for me and a few other users I corresponded with.)

Before 3.8, version 3.5 had an absolutely awful problem that would not allow disk error checking under any circumstances (at least without killing a key underlying SD protection.)

SD has promise. But apparently, lots of bugs too...

Yes, this is SD 3.8 and fully updated version. I do not encounter problems with CPU usage. Couple of days ago I were choosing anti-spyware program for myself and I make some exercises with them using performace monitor just to check how heavy CPU load they have. If you wish I can send you results.

Thanks for the offer. :) But I ended up going with Spy Sweeper (both at home and the office.)

Now that I think about it more, I kinda remember reading after my trials with SD that the version 3.8 CPU spike did not appear to be an issue if SD 3.8 was installed cleanly (not over an existing 3.5 installtion, which mine was.) If this is the case, then one of my main criticisms of SD is a moot point...