SanDisk Cruzer 16GB (USB) problem

Hello,

I've just bought a SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive with 16 GB of capacity. It's quite fancy in many ways, looks slick, nifty little slider to park the connector, shiny little red light, fantastic U3 applications that I'll never use, ... Which is all well, but in regards to its primary function which is data storage I'm finding it absolutely appalling.

The reason I bought such a big USB drive in the first place was because I needed to store an 8 gigabyte file on it, and when I try to transfer this file over it tells me that the disk is full. It's not full, as a matter of fact it's completely empty with windows seeing and recognizing 14.9 gigabytes of free space on it.

At first I thought it might be all that U3 junk on it so I formatted the drive: no difference. I reinstalled all the U3 jazz and started looking for a file transfer section or a write protect option somewhere, no luck. So I've reformatted the drive again since I'm not interested in any of the U3 utilities. I just want a functional 16 (or 14.9) GBs worth of storage on this USB drive.

The most I've been successful in copying has been 1.5 gigabytes. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm running on XP SP2.

Thanks.

There is an explanation on Sandisk's website.
http://kb.sandisk.com/cgi-bin/sand [...] _topview=1