USB Drive letter not being recognised

Firstly I must say I am not the only one having this problem! As yet no one has come up with a solution.

Symptoms: You put a memory stick into the USB slot the drive light flashes on the stick nothing appears. No drive letter shows in 'my computer'.

Things tried:

Going into disk managment you can see the stick and open it explorer and put/transfer/view files on the stick. So its not the stick or the way its formatted etc. It works fine on my wifes (xp) lap top and it worked fine on this computer UNTIL I PUT VISTA ON IT!

I have tried giving it another drive letter. Have tried J:K:U etc shows up in managment again but nothing on screen.

I have the latest drivers for the USB drive.

I have tried 4 different makes of USB memory sticks, each one refuses to work. But will work under good old XP on another computer, and they allways work on my wifes XP laptop.

I have tried totally uninstalling the USB from the Device Manager Section, turning off the computer, turning it back on and letting the computer find the drives and their drivers and re-installing it, still nothing.

I have tried deleing files from the Windows:inf section I cannot remember which ones were suggested but there were two of them. I deleted them and replaced them with the latest ones, which turned out to be the ones I had anyway.

I have tried virtually every malware/spyware anti virus program on the internet and still nothing. AVG, CCleaner, Advanced System Care, Reg Cure, Spy Bot, Error Expert, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, spyware Doctor, Spyware Terminator to mention a few.

I have the latest updates from Microsoft installed including SP1 and SP2.

So before I give up and put it down to just another c*( up from Vista I open to any more suggestions.

Any of you guys clever enough to come up with a solution that works?