VMWare trashes my USB disk (RHEL4 host OS)

[Munky]

Hello,
My main disk is a USB disk with a partition I've created for holding VMs.

I created a Windows ME virtual machine on my RHEL4 host hosted on my UDB
disk VM partition and installed a vanilla instance of Win ME.

I booted the VM then activated my USB all in one printer/scanner/copier via
removable devices - I explicitly did not select HDD from the list of USB
devices.

The VM detected the new devices and went about asking for driver
installation.

Everything was fine until the VM rebooted - when this happened my VM
partition on my USB disk seemed to be remounted read only and when I
umounted and did an fsck it was well and truly trashed.

This has happened several times but things seem OK if I untick the removable
device before I shut down the VM. Now OK I should really be doing this, but
it's easy to forget and I'm not keen on the disk trashing :-(

I'm using VMWare Server.

I'd appreciate any ideas

cheers,
F.