Thanks Ed. Now that you showed the screens, I recall seeing that setting. I do believe I've left mine on the default wanting the best safety. I wasn't interested in fast access as I mainly copy large zip files. I don't think write buffers will make as much difference in that case.

I guess I've been too used to popping floppies and cd's out (watching the lights for activity of course) without needing to "disconnect" them. I must be too old to learn the new trick of having the OS disable the drive first.

So, the question remains. Do particular brands automatically set up the driver for write caching? Was there a change in WinXP (maybe with Service Pack 2?) that changed the default setting? My device is a Verbatim, but I have the same results with the Olympus camera, and some other cameras that I have connected to my systems.