Does anyone have any documentation that they can point me towards issues you could have regarding corrupption on a thumbrdive by editing and saving files between Win98, W2K, and XP filesystems?

I don't know of any documentation, and am about to be offline soon so don't have time to look. THe only issue I know of is the filesystem itself. Win98 runs on FAT or FAT 32, XP and win2000 run on FAT32 or NTFS. FAT32 filesystem cannot read or write to an NTFS drive, NTFS can read and write to both.

So if you originally format the thumbdrive as NTFS it will not be readable by a win98 machine at all. Most I think come preformatted FAT32 so any Windows OS should be able to handle it. Saving documents, pictures, etc should give you no problems. I use mine a lot for working on customers' machines, I install security software such as AdAware and Spybot, AVG, the Firefox browser and also download and install drivers on both FAT32 and NTFS systems. Usually I do the downloading on a Linux (Mandrake) machine, then transfer it to Windows and have never had any problems at all switching back and forth.

The only time it should give you any problems is if the drive itself is formatted NTFS, which would not be a good idea. Formatted FAT32 any Windows OS should be able to read it, win98 usually requires drivers for the USB drive while ME and up usually have native drivers making it literally plug and play. Saving files and transferring them from one OS to another should be no problem at all, I do it almost daily. And I'm adding Linux into the mix, it's not using either FAT32 or NTFS, but the Linux native filesystem EXT2, and it still works great. I've been installing drivers and security applications on Windows machines after downloading them on Linux for over a year, it has never failed to work.

It is unusual and not generally recommended to install a journalling file system such as NTFS onto Pen Drives - even though it can be done with a bit of "tweaking".

Even so this would not, of itself, lead to file system corruption. The biggest cause of corruption is when a USB drive is detached during a file i/o operation. Always ensure that it is "safe" to remove the drive before doing so or only do it when the pc has been normally powered down.

Another possible cause of file corruption and data loss is if Win9X OSes are used to access FAT partitions that actually traverse the 128/137 GB barrier.