SYMPTOMS

You may experience intermittent problems when you try to access the floppy disk drive on a computer that is running Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1). For example, when you try to copy files to a floppy disk by using Windows Explorer, you may receive the following error message:

The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

CAUSE

This problem may occur when Windows dynamically changes the computer processor power state to a deeper idle state (from the C2 state to the C3 state).

Yesterday I went back and tried to fix my floppy drive problem. This has been going on for  a long time and is annoying because I cannot create usable bootdisks. The first thing I did was replace the floppy drive. With a brand new drive I got errors and unusual chkdsk sounds when creating a bootdisk for ghost. I fixed the bootdisk by going to a Win98 machine and copying over good copies. I checked the md5 for ghostpe and it was different on the floppy although it had the correct filesize. Last night I updated the bios to make sure the cmos was not the source of the problem. Today I found this KB. It sounds very much like the problem I have been experiencing but I am real reluctant to edit the registry to fix this problem.