Gary's comments were good. However, when you say it was not recognized, but still plugged in I have another thought. At a conference several years back folks would plug in there memory sticks to load their paper and then use the icon to uninstall it. Problem was they would uninstall every thing in that icon, including the CD drive and anything else there. It may be that another memory stick was installed and then all the connected USB devices were unconnected when it was removed. You do not always have to uninstall a USB memory stick, though it is risky not to - actually I rarely do and only ran into a problem 1 time. If you shut the memory stick down, just be sure only your memory stick is referenced and uninstalled. Gary made some good points about PAF listing the actual file location and that it may actually be on the hard drive. At a FHC, it might be good to use a temporary folder for folks to load things and then copy them to a USB later and remove them from the folder. This is similar to establishing a folder for presentations on the desktop where folks can load them for a conference, rather than messing up the desktop itself. Actually, I think it is possible to set up the desktop so folks can not write to it, but allow writing to a folder that is put on the desktop. Might be worth a try. Then PAF could be set up to use that folder as a default. It would save a lot of pain for folks and set up standard procedures for folks to use. I have not been successful at locking down the desktop (even through DOS), but even without this aspect, a folder on the desktop for users to put files and that is the default working folder for PAF may solve a lot of issues. Bill > Gary Templeman wrote: > > If she had previously worked with her file on that computer, is it possible > > that rather than doing a restore, that she opened it from the File menu and > > used a copy on the hard drive (which may not be in the default location)? > > The full path is shown at the top of the window when the file is open in > > PAF. What happens when you launch PAF again, or if you go to File and select > > her file name from the recent file list? If PAF can't locate it then it was > > probably on the flash drive which got corrupted. If PAF can open it from the > > recent file list you will be able to easily see the location. > > > > It is also possible that here flash drive is one of the brands that has to > > be run the first time under an administrator login for Windows to find it, > > which could explain why it could be explored on another computer but not > > that one. The fact that it worked on the other computer also indicates that > > the drive itself is not faulty. > > > ************** > The drive has previously worked on that computer. Later when I > re-plugged it in the computer recognized it and it worked. When I > arrived it was "disconnected", but plugged in. (I.e. the computer did > not recognize its presence, but it was in the socket. I strongly > suspect that the connector had been "bumped" and this caused a momentary > disconnect of one of the pins. This in turn could have caused the > computer to "disconnect" - - - or something. But we will never > know.. Richard > *************