Unfortunately, at some point the flash drive got wonky, and most of the time, when I plug it in, it shows up as empty. The other day I could SEE the files ...
... but I couldn't MOVE the files. Does anybody have a clue as to there being any hope for getting the files off that dying flash drive and onto my current system? Would this be the sort of thing that something like GeekSquad might be able to help with? I don't want to throw much money at this, but I've got several days worth of effort represented there, and if there's a way (that would be more productive than plugging it in on my system) to retrieve those files, I'd be much relieved!
{edit}
Nevermind...
So, very soon after I posted this the thought popped into my head: "What if I plugged this into my netbook?" Now, I had no reason to expect that the netbook would read this any better than my desktop did, but I fired up the Acer, plugged in the flash drive, and lo and behold, it read it. I was able to at least move the files over to the netbook, now I just need to get them over here. There were nearly 3gb of stuff there (the one main file folder had like 7,000 files ... which is why I really didn't want to "start over" on pulling that together!), so I need to dig up a functioning 4gb drive or bounce those out to a file sharing site. At least they now exist in two places!