A friend of mine has a dell inspiron 600m laptop...she is running xp sp2 and has 512mb ram. She has had this problem for quite some time but whenever she tries to put in a flashdrive(doesnt' matter what brand) the computer detects it and brings up the install hardware wizard. Well whenever it would SEARCH for a driver it always comes up with an error saying can't install hardware windows cant located a driver for this device. Well I know that with xp you don't need to download drivers or not supposed to. It will recognize other usb devices just fine so I don't think it would be the usb ports themselves. I have tried LOOKING for a driver anyway just to say that I tried this option...well I couldn't find any made for xp( oh and her flashdrive is a lexar firefly which they were on SAFETY recall due to burning up but she got hers after all that mess was over with) I even tried mine and it still wouldn't work. In device manager it would come up with a ! mark above her flashdrive and it would name her flashdrive what it is supposed to be named (JD Firefly) if I click update driver or install driver it never would do anything...always come up with can't find driver for this device or no driver installed. I tried doing the sfc /scannow and that didn't FIX it though it didn't even ask for her xp cd which in all the other forums I have read it usually asks for it...not sure if this maybe it. Not really sure what the problem is. I was going to try and plug her flashdrive in and go into disk managment and change the drive letter..haven' tried this yet but maybe it will work...the only other thing I can think of is to whipe her HARDDRIVE and completely reinstall everything. If anyone has any suggestions or has had this problem I would like to hear as much input as I can. Thnx.Have you contacted a Dell helpdesk?

No I haven't.