I'm not quit sure what the point of you post is, in light of my trying
to help Graeme get his to work again. I didn't ask what file system
was used on factory formatted flash drive after all...

More info on what I have recently done with flash drives, for those
who are interested:

The first thing I did when I got my 2G Lexar was to delete the factory
partition, create two new ones, format one for Windows, and format the
other ext3 for Linux. Works great.

I think I did the Windows formatting under Linux with mkfs.vfat, but I
can't remember. I formated a little 128M generic flash drive that way
the other night, and I could use it on one Windows machine, but my
wife's laptop couldn't see it, and I had to reformat it on her
machine, then they both could see it. I remember this happening at
work some years back as well. Works on some machines, not others.
Every other time I can think of that I've formatted a Windows
partition with Linux, it has worked out.