VB6 will not recognize external hard drive

Running Visual Studio 6.0 / VB6 on Win7 32bit HP desktop.
I have a 2Tbyte external USB hard drive plugged into one of the "SS" usb ports. Windows 7 explorer recognizes it as drive "e" and I can see all 2 Tbytes and can move files back and forth from the internal hard drive. My VB app writes copious amounts of data to the external drive on older pc's. The VB app on THIS pc and OS does not recognize this drive "e" or drive "E". Has anyone else experienced this anomaly.