Too many Generic volume shadow copy driver installs and device instances

I see one or two installs of the Generic volume shadow copy device driver in Reliability Monitor every day, and there are currently 97 Generic volume shadow copy device instances under the Storage volume shadow copies entry in Device Manager. If I uninstall those drivers in Device Manager, they reappear as soon as I "Scan for hardware changes."



My research so far tells me this is related to my use of USB Flash drives on my system. I keep one plugged in all the time for ReadyBoost, and another comes and goes for data transfer to/from my notebook PC, and other test machines I run. Of course, as Murphy would have it, this is on my primary production machine.



I've checked to make sure all of my USB and related Intel chipset drivers are current (they are, according to DriverAgent). ReadyBoost also appears to be working OK (it shows up in Resource Monitor as a regular reader during normal operations when Vista is running, and is a heavy writer at startup and shutdown, as you'd expect).



I'm concerned about the number of virtual devices that Device Manager is managing here, and wonder why Vista finds it necessary to install new drivers for Generic volume shadow copy devices every day. I bet if I go back and count the number of driver install instances in Reliability Monitor, it will probably match the number of devices that show up under Storage volume shadow copies in Device Manager, in fact.



Can anybody tell me what's going on here? Should I be concerned, or not? Is there anything I can (or should) do about this?



TIA for your help and support.



--Ed--

 

I've found the management of USB drivers to be a particularly bad failing of Vista -- which is really surprising seeing that USB is not a "new" technology. Over a year and a half since Vista went public, people are still having problems getting Vista to "see" their Passport USB drives.



Sorry for an obvious question, but what happens if you remove the two plugged-in USB devices, remove the shadow drivers, and reboot without the devices plugged-in? Does Vista recreate ALL 97 driver instances? Or, does it only create two new instances on every boot in which the devices are still plugged-in?

 

According to no less a luminary than Mark Russinovich, the Sysinternals guy and Windows whiz extraordinaire, this simply reflects the number of restore points and volume shadow copy snapshots (the latter being part of the former) that the system knows about. See my blog at http://www.viztaview.com/index.php/...volume-shadow-copies-and-generic-volumes.html for the details. Turns out it has nothing to do with flash drives or USB, a potential cause upon which I stumbled as a "red herring," rather than a real cause.



Thanks for your input and ideas nonetheless. Case closed, so please close this thread!



Thanks again,

--Ed--