"R.Wieser" wrote:

I've got a problem with accessing a 32GB FAT32-formatted USB stick.
Although reading from it seems to go fine, either writing big or
many files to it causes the computer to freeze hard (forcing a hard
reset). 8GB sticks have always worked fine (never had or used 16GB
sticks).

Does anyone know why this happens and how to fix it.

If you have access to a win-7 machine, then the first thing to try is
plug the stick into the win-7 machine and see if you get any messages
like "the drive is messed up" or need to be repaired. If not, then get
the properties on the stick and make sure its formatted as FAT32 and not
Exfat or ntfs.

Beyond that, I know I have issues sometimes plugging in a thumb drive
into the chassis-mounted USB port on my win-98 system.

This looks like a bad or intermittent contact issue. Sometimes plugging
in the stick half way (or just short of all-the-way) makes the
difference between Win-98 seeing or not seeing the stick.