I recently bought a Sandisk cruzer micro 4GB USB stick and of course it comes with that U3 crapola preloaded on it.

Formatting the stick does not get rid of it entirely.  If you click (in Windows XP) Start then Run then type COMPMGMT.MSC, click OK, then click Disk  Management from the window that appears, you’ll notice there are two partitions on the stick, one of which is a CDFS system labeled "U3 System".

Try as you might, there’s no way to get rid of it from there.

There are two ways to get rid of this stupid thing to reclaim the space.

First method: Load the stick in Linux and use your partition software o’ choice (like GParted) to remove it.

Second method: Use the U3 uninstaller program for Windows. Just click the "Remove U3" link there to download the program, then run it to completely format the stick to reclaim all the space back.

I have a SanDisk 2 GB flash drive which I use quite frequently, but one of the biggest annoyances I have with it is the “pseudo-installation” of the U3 application every time I plug the device in. If this sounds familiar to you, and you want to remove it (like I did), then here are the instructions.

I haven’t had the need to find out if you can install U3 back on the drive if you need to, but I would choose to go with the PortableApps distribution instead.

U3 does not actually install anything on your system, so it does no harm by existing on your flash drive. I just found the startup time for accessing the drive somewhat annoying every time I plug it in.