OK, I've had this problem for a while now. Its not a big problem as its easy to work around but its a little annoying.

Whenever I plug in a piece of hardware (USB) like a mouse or a flash drive XP will come up with the Found New Hardware Wizard. Normally, for something like a flash drive, XP will recognize what it is and do all the legwork for you with no user input whatsoever. But XP will always ask whether I want to connect to the internet, install automatically etc etc. Its easy to get around because I just choose No connecting to the internet, and Yes to install automatically. It will come up regardless of whether that piece of hardware has been plugged in before or not.

For a flash drive its particularly annoying because A) its the most commonly plugged-in piece of hardware on my computer and B) because i have to go through the Wizard 3 times. Once for Mass Storage Device, once for Drive and once for Volume.

An undefined amount of E-Pigs for whoever can solve this.


EDIT: Just remembered something else. When XP is installing the driver for the device I will get a warning saying the driver isn't digitally signed even though the driver that's being installed came with XP. I would expect the components of XP not to provoke such a warning. Just goes to prove Windows sucks.