Basically, every time I restart my computer (running Vista Business edition) it has recently (read: since I installed Vista SP1) detected a floppy disk drive. The problem is... I don't have one. So every time it boots, it hangs for a second, then goes to the desktop and says "installing new hardware" in the bubble in the systray. I go to My Computer and there's mysteriously a floppy drive there! I right click, it waits for a 30 second (appriximately) timeout before it realizes that maybe the hardware isn't going to respond, go to properties, disable the device, uninstall the driver, everything is fine again. Restart computer a few days later for whatever reason... IT'S BACK!!!one!!1

Basically I'm thinking there may be another driver somewhere (perhaps part of the motherboard drivers) that is tricking Vista into looking for my missing floppy drive. I don't know where to even begin looking for issues like that, but I would like to not have to deal with this stupid thing every time I boot.

Therefore... GIMMEH TEH YOUR SUGGESTIONS!

Check your boot settings in your bios and see if it's trying to boot from one?

Booting from floppy was dropped to like 3rd priority (after HDD and DVD drive) and then disabled.

Peck around in bios and look for the floppy disk controller. Most bios will allow you to disable the onboard controller, give that a shot.

MM3 is the winner. Found a stupid little spot where BIOS was assigning drive letter A to a 3.5" floppy. Vista must have decided that it should be damn well prepared.