I have been using a USB external hard drive for a couple of years on two different computers, running Microsoft XP 32, Vista 64, and Vista 32. Recently, after copying quite a bit of stuff to the external drive, Vista 32 has started telling me "access denied" when I try to access the USB drive, either from Explorer or from a command prompt. Chkdsk did not find anything wrong with the drive, but utilities such as icacls don't help, I only get "access denied" with these. The system seems to have no problem looking at the drive, but at the administrator level it is blocked. A program called Process Monitor shows that svchost.exe has access to the drive, but EXPLORER.EXE always gets "access denied". When svchost.exe accesses F: it then does a few things, such as CreateFile, QueryInformationVolume, SetBasicInformation, and FileSystemControl. Any ideas about this?

I figured it out... it's not autorun.exe as I stated, it's autorun.ini, but anyway, it doesn't belong there... just delete it and all works fine now...