Okay, so I decided to give vista a whirl, put everything I wanted on my external HDD, and did a clean install for it. now, my external hard drive hangs my computer when it's on. my 'computer' and 'disk management' folders will sit there and not respond, but will come back from it as soon as I turn the drive off. It's almost as if it can't access the drive: in my disk management screen, when I turn it on, it recognizes the drive before it stops responding, but it just says the total space for it, not how much is left. and, when I turn off the drive, in the 'my computer' window, it is there for a split second and shows that I have space taken up. I just hooked it up to my other computer which is still running XP and it works fine..hrmm. What could be going wrong? I thought maybe I needed to install USB drivers, but both my mouse and keyboard are usb and they work fine...

My external HDD (firewire) works great with Vista build 5472 & I doubt it wouldn't work just the same if I still had build 5456. Have you tried removing all the USB controllers from the device manager and letting Vista repopulate it when you reboot?

Yes, I've tried that, and no luck :/ hrmm..this is kind of aggravating. I don't really want to go back to windows xp, I really like Vista. lol.

As a follow up: The weird thing is, on ehte taskbar, under where it says 'safely remove hardware' it has it listed fine. Yet, it makes my disk management screen and my my computer screen lock up when it's on (nothing else does, however).