Failure to ope floppy in "My Computer"

Clicking on the floppy drive's icon in the "My Computer" folder results in an error: The process for the media protocol died unexpectedly. This used to work just fine. Since I rarely use the floppy I can't pin down exactly when it started to fail but I did just notice it yesterday. One potential culpret is an update to the kernel a few days ago: kernel-smp-2.6.11.4-21.7 Anyone else see this problem? Other possibility is also related to the kernel. I just recently turned on hyperthreading and switched to the SMP kernel. This was shortly before the update to the -21.7 level. Thanks.