Can't access USB flash drive in 'My Computer'

Hi,

I can't access my USB flash drives by double clicking them in the 'My Computer' window of windows explorer. It shows a small dialogue box with a red cross saying Cannot find application. However, when I right click on the drive and choose explore, it opens my usb drive without any problem. The first option is in bold and says install or run application which is weird because I don't think I have any application on it. I am also pretty sure there is no autorun.inf on the drive. Also when plugging in the drive, the auto play window pops up and I can access the drive contents by choosing the browse option. In is only in 'My Computer' that double clicking to browse doesn't work.
Also the flash drives works in my other computer without any problems.
I also have a usb hdd which works ok and built in card readers that work ok too on the same computer, it is only USB flash drives that don't work.
I am using Vista Home Premium and the problem only appeared recently.
It might have stopped working after my friend plugged his sandisk cruzer that seemed to have 2 partitions on it into my computer and vista autoinstalled some drivers for that usb drive.
I am not sure if that caused the problem.
I'm not sure if a virus can cause problems like this. (I have norton antivirus 2008 but the subscription expired)(I think it still actively protects my computer because it picked out the eicar test virus when I downloaded it)

Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide some help.

Regards,

Chris