Ok, here's another one for the empeg braintrust (seriously, Tom should rename this forum).

Again with a friend's computer. I mapped a network drive to the letter "F" on their Windows XP SP3 machine,which was the first available drive letter.

Since that time they are unable to insert any external drives, whether they be thumbdrives or normal drives. In each case Windows will assign them to "F" - and if the mapped drive is active, the newly plugged drive simply doesn't show up.

If the mapped drive is not active (off for example) then the mapping is always visible in Explorer and any externally plugged USB drives will show up under that mapping. PLugging in a thimb drive will not cause a drive letter to show up in the physical drive section of myComputer and it will never show the name for the newly plugged drive. You need to open the mapped drive which shows the name of the network share to see its contents.

I have no idea what's going on. My solution was to map the network drive to "Z" to just keep it out of the way of any physical USB drives.

The wife is pushing to get a new iMac (for other reasons) and I told them that for what they use the machine for that they don't necessarily need a terribly fast machine and what they have (POS Dell with a Celeron) is certainly capable enough. Of course it would be nice to solve these BS problems.

Your strategy is the only strategy I've ever used or seen in use- map drives to letters that are later in the alphabet.
No shame in it.

I don't necessarily have an issue with the strategy I've employed, but it seems Windows isn't doing the right thing here. An issue I thought was likely specific to his machine and possibly related to the other problem I described last month in another thread (USB drives will not appear within that machine's network shares when browsing the network).

I don't recall this issue in the past with my own machine and using lower letters for mapped network drives. When I purposefully add network mappings to Windows, I normally set them to higher letters and try for some meaning/relation to their contents. In this instance I had set the drive to "F" to try and minimize any trouble locating some files which were previously referenced locally on "F"