If it often happens while un-installing a program, I’d start by laying the blame on the un-installer. Un-installers are often the worst-written programs you will ever find on a computer, and the least tested. It wouldn’t surprise me that a badly written one could cause an entire partition to be un-mounted.

But I have another problem and would be interested if someone else with a similar setup has the same. Sometimes when I uninstall a program (seems to depend on the installer) the whole documents partition gets unmounted! With all the consequences of having no user profile anymore (programs resetting to default settings, all icons vanishing in the start menu, quicklaunch and desktop, aso.). I immediately have to open regedit change the profile path for every profile to the drive letter of the docs partition. Then I have to restart, because some programs already wrote in a new “docs and set” folder on the system drive, and as long as there are files in it you can’t mount a partition in it. After the restart you see which programs are intelligent and using the USERPROFILE variable and which use hardcoded paths. One annoying example is the AVG virus scanner which always uses the path given at install for logfiles. Logfiles you can’t delete until you killed all AVG processes, which is a challenge in it’s own. Whenn the directory is empty again, the docs partition can be mounted to it again (I keep the drive letter, too, because I know I’ll need it again).

After changing the settings in the registry again and a reboot, everything is back to normal. Luckily I never lost any data or settings (programs reverting to defaults is temporary) or had other problems like not being able to login (which IMO is just big luck). So it’s mainly an annoyance (that took me some time to repair the first time it occured; now I’m done in 10 minutes).

I don’t know why this happens. It seems to be a badly programmed uninstaller, that wreaks havoc when trying to delete something in the profile folder (e. g. start menu entries). Has someone else experienced this mediocre handling of NTFS mount points with XP? Man, I love linux for having a single TEXT! – file for it’s mounts (and not a cryptic, unmanageable registry) and completly transparent handling of mount points.