I recently got a Toshiba laptop running vista home premium.
 
After transferring my usb flash drive between it and my desktop running XP Pro , the XP machine failed to recognise the flash drive and claimed it had malfunctioned. vista continued to see it clearly. I tried it in my XP machine at work and the same problem occurred - XP couldn't see it and claimed malfunction.
 
Now for the odd part!
 
I plugged the drive in the vista machine, went in to the properties of the device and set it back to defaults etc. I put it in to the XP machine, reformatted it and XP on my desktop sees it every time, yet if I plug it in to my XP machine at work I still get the same doesn't recognise/malfunction message