Well, I had 2 old laptops given to me by someone who had cracked their screens. They were old enough and new screens costly enough that I scrapped them for parts, basically just saving the IDE HHDs and ram. Installed one in an external USB enclosure and it worked great. Tried the same with the second and here's what happened:

Found New Hardware: USB to IDE Bridge

Found New Hardware: Disk Drive

Found New Hardware: Your new hardware is installed and ready to use

All this notwithstanding, Windows Explorer shows C: D: but NOT this drive. I've tried it with just one USB (on the Y-cable) connected and with both connected. And yes, the external enclosure is intended for an IDE drive.

Any suggestions?

The PC I'm using is a Dell P4 with XP SP3.

When you click on "My Computer", do you see it connecting and disconnecting, and as what?

It never even appears in "my computer".