Vista deleting perfectly good files

I've run across an incredibly irritating "feature" of Vista. At least, I think it's a Vista thing because I never had this happen in XP.

Every once in a while, I'll be saving an open file (Excel or Word) to my flash drive. It looks like it's taking a long time, then I get a pop up box saying something like "drive door may be open" (as if I were using a floppy or something). Then it says that the file can't be saved, and the file disappears from the screen.

Then comes the horrific part...the file was deleted from the flash drive. It's just gone. Any changes I made since the last time I made a backup copy of the file are lost forever. I tried running a File Recover utility, and there is no trace of the file there either. I know that in XP, while a save is in progress, it is saving under a temporary file name, and only when the save is complete does it overwrite the original file.

If I'm going to continue using Vista, I'll be forced to spend 10 or 20 minutes every single day making frequent backup copies of any files I modify. UNLESS someone else has heard of this problem and knows a way to deal with it. Anyone? Please?

 

Have you tried a different flash drive to see if maybe the flash drive is bad?