Don -

Re the Format thing. When you insert a floppy and right click on your A:\ drive (in Windows Explorer), select format, the "Quick Format" and "Create Boot Disk" options are check boxes. If you leave both of them unchecked you'll get a "full format" - the default. If there's a check mark in one of them, just click in the box to remove the check.

I don't have any info on the SuperDisk drive, but I suspect that XP is doing the standard Plug-and-Play search everytime you boot, and it's identifying the drive as one or the other of its two possible kinds, floppy or SuperDisk. If it finds the SuperDisk drive as a "second floppy," then there may be a conflict with your A:\ and B:\ drive setup (BIOS?) that interferes with the "plain vanilla" A:\ drive.

The SuperDisk drive manufacturer would need to produce an XP compatible driver set and it appears that what you have doesn't fill the bill. There may be some real difficulties in producing an XP/2K compatible driver, since the SuperDisk drive may rely on direct hardware access to determine which "personality" it should be using. One of the key reasons that XP (and to a lesser extent Win2K) are more stable is that the "hardware protection layer" that's built in makes it very difficult for a program to connect directly to any piece of hardware. Everything goes through Windows. (This is also the main reason why many old games - and my favorite old music scoring program - won't run satisfactorily on XP.)

It's entirely speculative, but it might be possible to give up the dual media capability of the SuperDisk drive, and use it only with one or the other of its media - if you can find a stripped down driver to do that. A sort of trivial question is whether the drive "boots" as a 125MB drive if you boot with a formatted SuperDisk in place.

Having two 1.44MB floppy drives is really sort of overkill with XP, since any machine that has enough RAM to run XP isn't going to burp over the piddly little 1.44MB you can swap in and out of one. I can remember when a diskcopy A:\ to A:\ meant several disk swaps, but any XP suitable machine should do it in one pass.

I have seen some reports of problems with the EnergyStar (or other "energy saver") shutdown with XP. The Mickey$oft Knowledge Base has a couple of articles on problems in this area, with no real solutions. They do note that the system may fail to respond "if the mouse is moved while the system is shutting down;" but as I recall, I believe this one only applied to USB mousies. I can't claim any real experience with it, since the "energy saving" features are one of the first things I turned off on my desktop. I haven't had any problems with it on my laptop, but I use it only when absolutely necessary.

John