Greetings,

I'm running the latest Winstep Extreme on a win 7 PC. Everytime I plug in my USB thumb drive Nextstart freezes. I've tried several different thumb drives in all my different USB ports with the same issue. I'm including a screen shot from Event viewer. If I reset everything in Nextstart, the issue is gone.

After resetting everything in Nextstart, and then restoring my backup, the issue seems to have vanished. Why would this happen?

Thanks for the picture, although it doesn't tell me much.

As far as I know there are no issues with NextSTART and USB thumb drives. I use thumb drives here all the time without a problem, for instance.

I would perhaps suspect your AV software interfering with NextSTART, although I still find it odd that NextSTART freezes but WorkShelf doesn't.

Something else I would try is make a backup of your NextSTART settings (NextSTART Preferences -> Advanced tab -> Backup) and then reset NextSTART to factory defaults (Preferences -> Advanced -> Troubleshooting -> Reset Everything), to see if that makes a difference.

If it does, then this might be a settings problem (which would be good news because it would make it easier to debug), if it doesn't, then the real culprit is probably external to NextSTART.

Hmmm... Good question. You restored the backup you made just before resetting NextSTART, of course?

Yes, restored the backup I just made before resetting everything.

Good question, then.

The only way to know why would be to compare the contents of your backup file with the contents of the settings in the Registry before you restored. But the latter got overwritten when you restored your backup.

Well, after a reboot the issue is back again. By the way, this didn't always happen. It started a few months back.

Ah-ah!

Well, now is our chance to try the above (and perhaps what I suggested in my first post, but in this case you will apparently need to reboot after resetting the settings to default).

Make sure NextSTART is not just freezing randomly (i.e.; sometimes freezes, sometimes not).

Ok, so I "reset everything" again....rebooted and Nexstart works perfectly with my thumb drives. I then restored my backup.....rebooted and the issue returned.

I'm gonna go make a fire in the wood stove....be right back!

Ok, this tells us it is a settings problem. Now 'all we have to do' is figure out which one(s) - and also why it only starts happening after a reboot. lol

Can you please send your backup file to the Winstep support address so I can have a look at it for any obvious clues?

Sending now.

Sent!

Douglas, what is the drive letter of your thumb drive?

(F:)

I had some time this afternoon to work on this problem. Since I keep quite a few image files of my system on hand, I started going backwards restoring image files until this problem stopped. As it turns out, as soon as I restored an image that contained the older 15.9 version of Winstep extreme, the problem vanished. I then updated all my other software with reboots after each one and my thumb drive works perfectly. As soon as I update to the latest version of Winstep Extreme, the problem comes back.

I create and restore alot of images using thumb drives to boot from, so this issue is especially annoying for me.

I didn't really figure anything out I guess beyond the fact that there's something after version 15.9 that creates this issue on my system.