Installation - Portable Applications On USB - Memory Stick

Immediately after purchasing an 8 GB USB flash drive with the intention of running portable applications off it on the various Windows XP machines I have to use, I had installed the Portable Apps Base (http://portableapps.com/suite) and then through it, several applications, including OpenOffice Portable, Firefox portable and Tucan Portable. Probably after using the drive on one of my office computers, some files and folders seemed to become corrupted. After trying unsuccessfully to delete mysterious, un-openable files with special characters in their names that appeared seemingly from nowhere, I formated the drive.

After formating, I was able to copy data and music files from my computer's hard drive to the flash drive correctly. However, I am now unable to properly re-install the PortableApps Base program on the flash drive. Thus, the main purpose of buying it is defeated. The PortableApps software does seem to install, but when I double-click on the StartPortableApps.exe icon on the flash drive (F:SoftwarePortableStartPortableApps.exe), I get various error messages. Sometimes the message says that only part of the read request could be executed, and sometimes I get "StartPortableApps.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close". I got the latter after scanning the drive with an antivirus (no virus detected) and then checking the drive for errors (F -> right clock -> Properties -> Tools -> Error checking).

As a lay person, my guess is that something necessary for properly installing the programs was lost when I formated the drive. However, I do not see why this should happen, because the hard drive on my home computer has been formated more than once when it became infected, but there was never any problem with installing software afterwards.