My Ogg player broke when I tried to install its software on my XP machine – it seems that the software tried to update the firmware (without asking me) and failed for some reason.

A friend of mine is here for a visit and for fun, we plugged the stick in his vista notebook – and it instantly found some "STMP3500" "player recovery device". After searching for STMP3500, I’ve found an XP driver (different player vendor, but it worked perfectly) which allowed the firmware updater to do its magic: and now it works 🙂