Ok I give up - How do I speed up USB drive read/writes?

I don't use Vista often, but when I do I often need to shift some files
about, typically with a USB stick - Snag is it's painfully slow, this is the
case with a number of USB sticks and card readers.

I know it's a Vista thing (at least in some cases) because if I boot my own
Vista machine from a live CD with another OS I can copy the files between
the HDD and the USB stick -much- faster. USB IDE drives in a caddy seem
okay, it's just SSDs that cause a problem.

Have googled/Asked/etc and looked through the threads on this group but
couldn't find any reference to this one.

So, what do I turn off to get Vista up to speed?

Regards

Mike