Weird floppy problem

This is a new one for me. I'm running WinXP Pro and suddenly during reboot the floppy drive starts thrashing non-stop and Windows will not continue loading until I appease said drive with a disk. Even after doing this the activity LED remains solid and the drive is not accessible. This happens approximately one out of every three reboots. Once this happens, it will do it after every reboot until the problem is resolved.

So far the only solution I've come up with is to remove the floppy drive from the device manager and immediately reboot. If I simply scan for new hardware after removing the drive it starts thrashing immediately after Windows finishes installing it.

Once all this is done the floppy works fine, so I assume that this is a software problem, but I'm not 100% positive.

Anyone here ever run into a similar problem or have any suggestions?

Thanks...

Try looking in "My recent documents", there might be a document that refers to A: that it's trying to find for you.

Do you have antivirus set to check th floppy drive?

Do you have something like adaware or a trojan checker looking to check the A: drive?