Thanks Battle. I spent awhile today trying to shake this down, and after updating some drivers and reading stuff on various forums I came to the conclusion that my Dell Inspiron 530's internal SD card slot is simply not SDHC compatible. I'm sure that's the case with my cheapo GE USB card reader too.

It was late Sunday afternoon and I didn't feel like making the long trek to Best Buy to get a new card reader, so I hit upon a solution which might not be so obvious and could help someone else. My Nuvi 5000 GPS has an SD card slot and USB2 interface. Popped the card in there, plugged into the computer and bingo! Worked perfectly for copying about 5GB of files to an 8GB SDHC card. Come to think of it, I probably could have done the same with my Nikon too.

So, in a pinch, see if you have a camera or GPS that can be used as a card reader... it worked for me.

No older SD readers will be compatible with SDHC. While the physical form factor of the two appears identical, and the contacts also look identical SDHC is a different media design internally.

I remember when SDHC was announced it was stated in reviews I read that the new SDHC cards would require a newly designed reader. Limited backward compatibility with SD cards exists in most cameras and flash recorders designed for SDHC because the contacts are identical.

And on a side note it is generally best (if not required) to format, clear, initialize, or delete data from SD and SDHC cards in the camera and not the computer. I forgot a couple of times and wound up with a media card the camera would not recognize, both times initializing the media in the camera cleared it up.

I got 3 of the little USB readers that were sold with Sandisk SDHC cards and those work fine with Sandisk and PNY cards.