I use a portable USB drive that gets hooked up to various machines. I
have turned off system restore on the drive, but if I forget to shut
off the drive or disconeect it before I do a power cycle, when the
computer (running XP or W2K) reboots, it will set a restore point on
the portable USB external hard drive.

Is there a way I can tell XP to shut off this behaviour once and for
all so that it will not use the portable harddrive to save restore
point information?

Note: I do not see this behaviour with USB flash drives.

Thanks in advance.