How can a usb flash drive become write protected and how do I fix it?

[Heatherj]

I was working off my flash drive working on a Visual Basic program that was supposed to save user-input data to a text file. My programming successfully created the file, saved data to it, and read that data back into the application. Somewhere along the line though something happened. Now I keep getting error messages saying my flash drive is write protected. Please Help!

 

[tomatthe]

Check the 2nd post on this thread.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/24738-63-write-protected-flash-drive-removal-software

It is a very common topic.