Hmmm? Very interesting similarities between your former situation and my current one, patclash. Like in your case of being prompted to insert a Floppy Disk and your system then working once you pacify the prompt with an empty Floppy Disk ... MY Floppy Drive thrashing away sure seems to want a Floppy Disk inserted although I haven't officially gotten a prompt.
The first time I noticed this problem was when earlier in the week, I was trying to bring up Audacity Recorder Portable from my PortableApps.com menu on my Flash Drive. I immediately heard my Floppy Drive doing some scary thrashing away. For a while there, I thought I was gonna have to resort to the Task Manager to exit out of that situation. Eventually Audacity Portable came up and I used it fine. But, the horrible sounds during loading of Audacity didn't sound healthy for my Floppy Drive.
Yesterday, when I first tried to install the latest update of Speccy into my PortableApps.com menu, I got an error message. I succeeded on the 2nd attempt. But, then when I 1st tried to test the just installed Speccy, I got that Floppy Drive thrashing.
And I got that Floppy Drive thrashing on other occasions in the past couple of days ... with Flash Drive activity.
I seem to be able to copy Files from my Desktop to my Flash Drive OK ... IF I use the Right Click > Copy > Paste method. If I try to Drag and Drop, I get a considerable FREEZE and eventually the copy process goes through.
The upside is that there were no BSODs or any drastic problems that are making me pull out my hair and / or go ballistic.
Things are off just enough to where I know they are off and I get a bit concerned. It's basically just a little inconvenience here and there right now. Just an occasional Grrrrrrrr! But, nothing HUGE at this point.
Hopefully the clean install ... whenever I get around to it, will fix the problem
Or if ALWIL suddenly does notice a glitch somewhere and fixes it, well, that's also welcome.