Plugging in a flash drive freezes my Laptop. Help desperately wanted!

[morbidshark]

Acer V5-572G running Windows 10

First off, thanks in advance for anyone trying to help me through this.

Now the problem - since the beginning of this month, whenever I plug in a flash drive, my computer slows down to a crawl. Things take forever to respond and when I head to My Computer, the green loading bar at the top just keeps loading. I also can't see my partitioned drives when it's plugged in. It's not just one particular flash drive, even brand new ones give me the problem.
When a flash drive isn't plugged in, everything works just fine. Malwarebytes also shows my system is clean (it caught a couple of false positives but that was it)

I've also tried booting into safe mode and plugging it in and then it works fine!

I've seen a couple of suggestions flying around like 'go to device manager and uninstall all USB and storage devices' but that doesn't seem to work.

Acer asked me to reinstall Windows and honestly, there just HAS to be a way to fix this without going to that length, right? I don't want to have to go through reinstalling everything but if it has to be done, then so be it.

Any help?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hi there, morbidshark.

Instead of uninstalling all of the USB devices, try reinstalling or updating the USB controller's driver, to see if that fixes things up. Have you noticed if this happens with all of the USB ports?
Perhaps if you have available OS updates and install them, this might fix things up, if it is an OS related issue as the laptop manufacturer's customer support has suggested.
If my suggestions don't help, having in mind the things you've already tried, it really might come down to reinstalling your OS completely in hopes that this fixes the issue.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD