Problems with minidisc not launching to the desktop

Does anyone else use Sony Hi-MD software with a minidisc player? I am on a large research project with 10 of these machines and about 7 Mac laptops running everything from 10.3 to 10.5. This software was working fine up until about a week ago, when all machines stopped recognizing the minidisc player. When you plug in the minidisc unit via USB, it doesn't even launch to the desktop, although you can still see it in System Profiler.

Sony says that because you can see it in the System Profiler, it is not the Hi-MD software's issues, but is instead a OSX problem. Could there have been some kind of OSX modification within the last couple weeks that rendered the software incompatible?

We have a huge project and collecting all the data depends on using these machines. We're all Mac based and of course Sony is Mac incompetent.

Any help is greatly appreciated..

 

We have multiple machines, about 9 overall. Apparently some (3) are working fine still, but the rest have the same problem. Thanks for any help..