Gary, now that you mention it, thumb drives ARE a big pain in the bum. There's a lot of software out there that is supposed to prevent users from being able to use thumb drives. I'm sure its possible, actually - but I don't think its as hard as they are making it out to be. USB drives have UUIDs... I knew this on an instinctual level but actually learned about looking them up when I as trying to get some usb drives working in a Linux environment. And because I wanted these particular drives to always be mounted in the same folder, but could not always clearly indicate which device they'd be called (sdb1, sdc1, sdd1, etc), I found that I could specify them in Linux by their UUID, and thus always mount each USB drive to the same folder. Now, there must be a way to set up Windows to disallow unapproved UUIDs from being allowed access to the operating system.