I will make a long story short. I have a win 7 laptop and a win XP SP3 desktop which I am just replacing with a win 7 one. Two external 500MB USB flash drives. They worked perfectly in my XP desktop and I used them to backup data. But...after the last comprehensive XP update they both stop working in the XP PC. They still work as expected in Win 7 laptop and even in an old XP laptop I had in storage. What I did then I used a full mirror image hard disk I had from the XP desktop before the Windows update and to my surprise, or not, the disks loaded well in the PC. What is happening is that the external device icon on the bottom right shows up but the drives do not load and freeze the computer which needs a hard reset to restart. BTW, small flash drives work well in the XP desktop; it is only the two large flash drives, a WD and one Seagate that freeze the computer. Note that all PCs have the same antivirus and this was determined not to be the problem. Important: the flash drives load in safe mode! But Acronis cannot be used in safe mode to clone disk. Any ideas because I have tried everything, including resetting USB drivers?
Just a few notes that might jog some ideas for you. I have had my xp attempt an infection of my Win 7 (rootkit style) over the network before. When I caught it, I removed all old java and adobe programs that were left behind that some of these viruses run. My Win 7 runs a medium high level of security settings for users. (DO NOT run the settings it comes with IMO.) Seagate in the past has had tons of issue with drivers and early disk failures in the past in my experience. Many highly technical users will not run Seagate drives. WD has worked for me fine. I presume you have searched google for people experiencing similar problems. We once solved a ridiculously hard intermittent unix server issue by pasting the error message in google. I presume you have already used system restore. Keep in mind viruses can hide there as well and in also the hardware manager and those can be virtually impossible for people to find. Virus scanners often miss them as well. Create a dummy new user on the XP and see if the drives load with that new user. If it works in safe mode, then use msconfig in your user id starting with everything off and load section by section and later driver by driver. That should eventually find it, but take a long long time since you must reboot over and over. Good luck.
BTW, my XP leaves my network at the net of this month and will be used with Ethernet cable or in hotels only.
sounds like a driver conflict with windows explorer. try removing or disabling third party context menu items. like scan for virus or image this drive.