And for my 300th post

Came across this while trying to find a way to get rid of the "The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. Please try again later."

Of course I'm still looking for a good solution, but in the meantime:

Here’s how you disable XP’s annoying automatic preview:
regsvr32 /u /s shmedia.dll
You can enable it again by taking out the ‘/u’. This has no other side-effects.

(h/t to DjLizard)

Update: In the same thread, there is discussion of unlocker. It works.