Vista Wants to format EVERY external

I just bought a new notebook due to a motherboard failure during a bios update. I put the hard drive from the old laptop in an external enclosure.
When I first started attaching it via USB everything was fine, then Vista started asking me to format the drive. Same with ALL of my flash drives and with my camera XD card. I have to cancel out of the dialogs and sometimes they pop up again. Sometimes I have to disconnect and reconnect 2 or 3 times. Eventually Vista recognizes that there is data on the peripherals. I did an exhaustive search online and don't see a solution to this. I worry that one time I may inadvertantly erase all of my data.

Does anyone know what is causing this phenomenon? It is becoming very irritating and I will note it wasn't the case last week... this just started.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

I want to add that I went into autoplay in the control panel and disabled every automatic action except playing audio cds and DVDs.