How do i password protect a usb drive.I have some portable apps installed on this drive like Thunderbird.Firefox ect and would like to password protect this drive in case i lose it.I tried doing this using permissions and locked myself out of the drive!My comp=Vista home premium 32bit,pentium 4,250gb hd,2gb ram,1gb ready boost compatible usb drive/Thanks.

if you are talking about a flash drive, you'll need to buy a program to format the usb drive in a special way.

Most password protection programs aren't a good secutiry measure. They can be bypassed fairly easily.
If you are concerned about the data if it gets lost or stolen you should use an encryption program.
This is a very good one, a Free open source project too!
TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Linux

protect when first used, having no prior .des file will restore the existing backup.tar.gz, then upon a normal shutdown an encrypted .des backup file will be created using your protect passwd. At this point I do not automatically delete the old exising backup.tar.gz file. It is up to you to do this step.upon subsqeuent booting, the protect option is not asking for a new password but the password that must match that which was used to encrypted the backup file. If it does not match then no restore will occur, unless, of course, you did not remove the old backup.tar.gz. That is why I instructed you to remove it. Otherwise it can become confusing.Your second issue is a Qemu issue. Qemu with default setting has no access to real drives, only a virtual harddrive which does contain the starting backup.tar.gz. You should not remove the harddrive unless you become more familiar with Qemu and its support files, including their image file creation tools.