Random trick I learned about after all these years: if you use the Disk Management console in Windows 7 to reassign a drive letter for an external device, windows tries to give that device the same drive letter the next time you plug it in. Which makes it possible (unless you have a bajillion drives) to tell programs to expect data in fixed places and not worry about shuffling drive letters.

Not sure which version of windows introduced this, but it would have saved lots of trouble in the past :S