cannot access usb thumb drive

hi everybody,

a friend of mine asked me to try and recover data from a usb thumb drive which became unaccessible...
it is a sandisk cruzer micro 2.0gb. i tried it on several different computers, and in all the cases this is what happened:
the lights on the stick would start blinking;
a little window will pop up in the tray saying "found new hardware", "installing new hardware", etc;
after awhile it will say something about a problem during installation and the device might not work properly.
no drive letter will show up in My Computer
there is a "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray, however when i access it, the list of devices is empty;
in Device Manager it shows up as an Unknown Mass Storage device.

any idea what is going on? is there any chance of recovering the data?
it is one of those drives where you have to stick out the connector thingy with your thumb, and i have a suspicion that connections inside got messed because of that. but what do i know?