[Forseti]

Here's something you might want to try. Click on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' radio button with no devices connected. You should see an option of 'Safely Remove USB Mass Storage Devices' followed by the drive letters that Windows allocates to the USB ports. Now delete these drives and shut down your computer. Upon restart Windows will, as these USB ports are hard fixed to your PC, reinstall the necessary drivers from the OS. Once restarted, either check by double-clicking on 'My Computer' or the safely remove hardware button again to check that these USB drives are showing once more.

Now check to see that Windows behaves itself when USB devices other than the Freecom drive are connected - if so then the problem has been isolated to that particular device. It may be that this drive needs to be reformatted.

One other recommendation - don't have devices connected that are not essential, and others such as printers etc leave switched off during updates. I would also configure updates to advise that they are available but not to install automatically. I personally don't have any external drives etc connected to my PC when online as this leaves open the risk to a virus also infecting that drive if one is unlucky.