New USB Flash Drives Problem (Takes Forever for Drive to Show)

We are suddenly having a problem with USB flash drives and USB external hard drives in our organization. Users started reporting that their flash drives either were not working or took a long time to be recognized by the computer so that they could be used. It could take up to 10 minutes for the drive to be usable. Once it works, you can take the drive out and put it back in and it will work with no problem. If you kill your network connection before plugging a USB drive in, you will have no problems at all.

I have made a some observations regarding this problem.
1.) When you plug a USB drive in on a computer with the issue, you hear the connect sound and you see the installing drivers icon. The icon quickly reports that the drivers are successfully installed, but the drive does not show up in my computer.
2.) The drive shows up in Devices and Printers, but you cannot do anything to access it.
3.) Device Manager shows an Unknown Device. You can either try to update the driver or wait.
4.) If you wait, the unknown device will change to your USB drive in Device Manager and you will be able to use your drive.
5.) This is the big one. If you kill your network connection, USB drives quickly show and are usable as they would normally be.

Has anyone else seen this problem? Is there a specific Windows Update that could be doing this. Thanks.

Spike

1.Ask your users to do this:

Download v 0.8.1 of the drivecleanup.zip from Drive Tools for Windows.

Unzip it to a folder, say drivecleanup.

You will have two folders Win32 and x64 each containing DriveCleanup.exe for 32 bit and 64 bit respectively.

Disconnect from the network and then Remove all USB storage devices from your system (except your Keyboard and mouse) and reboot.

Right click on the DriveCleanup.exe and run as administrator. (Use the *.exe file appropriate for your bit version of Windows.).

After the clean up act, reboot connect to your network and check whether your system is doing well now with the external storage devices..

( When you plug in your USB devices after this cleanup these will be installed afresh. What you have done is to remove all non-present devices and drive letters associated with them and start with a clean slate. Hopefully that should resolve the problem.)

2. If you are not the network administrator, contact your network administrator. He might have changed some group policies on use of external storage devices either by design or accident..

Thanks jumanji. That worked for me.