LaCie External Hard Drive

I have an external hard drive here made by LaCie (which I think means crap-ola in French). It's called the Ethernet BigDisk. This is the first (and so far, the only) external USB drive I have used that does NOT plug and play. When it's plugged into a USB port, Windows XP detects it just fine, but it prompts for a driver and starts the new hardware wizard. So, I pointed the wizard to the CD that came with it. OK- the driver installs OK. But the external drive does NOT show up in My Computer. It does NOT show up in the Device Manager. It does NOT show up in the Disk Management Console. I rebooted. Same deal. When the drive is unplugged from the USB, and plugged back in, it prompts for a driver again! It does that every time it's plugged in. Thinking I must need to install all the software on the CD, I installed the '1-Click' backup software (which actually requires about 4 clicks to start the back up). Their back up software does NOT see the drive. There's an IP configurator on the CD supplied with the LaCie drive, so I launched that. It does it's thing, detects the network correctly, and still the drive does NOT show up anywhere. At one point after the IP configurator was installed, I was shown a window with one item listed in it (ETHERNET_BD was the item; I assume the BD stood for BigDisk). I highlighted the item in the window, clicked on 'connect' or whatever it was, and was prompted for a password like if I was trying to print to a network printer for the first time. I have no idea what this password is, or what the user name is. So I closed the configurator. From what I can see, the only way to get back to the window that lists ETHERNET_BD, is to launch the IP configurator from the CD. It doesn't install any software so you can just click Start > All Programs and lanuch it. The only thing installed is the LaCie 1-Click Backup. Out of curiousity, I hooked up a 'regular' external USB drive. It plugged and played and Windows installed it and it showed up as drive G:. Perfect. I launched the LaCie backup software, and it works perfectly with the 'regular' external USB drive, and their drive is still noit showing up anywhere. I have tried it on 2 different PC's so I know it's not an issue particular to a certain PC. If anyone has ever successfully run one of these LaCie Ethernet BigDisks with the software included on the LaCie disk (or even without it), or has ever been able to get the drive to appear anywhere on the PC (be it in My Computer or whatever), P L E A S E enlighten me as to what I am doing wrong. I have read the manual on the CD and followed the steps, but as we all know, these CD based manuals (and most paper based manuals) are completely worthless and nothing ever works as it shows it in the manual.
Any help or suggestions (no matter how lame) will be greatly appreciated.
THANKS!