As much as its hard for me to say it, but it was Avast causing the I/O device errors. Simply by stopping the resident shield (permanently) was not a good test. I totally removed Avast, rebooted and no problem now with the floppy. Recently I also was having stability probelms with XP Home, which I never had before. I would get reboots just starting certain programs. I had removed Norton Antivirus, previously and even used their Symclean and Norton antivirus remover, so I would have a clean install of Avast, but still had problems. I hope in the future this problem is corrected because I found Avast a fantastic antivirus program