Olympus SP-550UZ

I am unable to transfer pictures from my Olympus SP-550UZ to my PC running
XP Professional. This is both using XP's own software and the Olympus
supplied Olympus Master 2. When I attempt to transfer the pictures the
transfer fails with the message 'Cannot copy file: Cannot read from the
source file of disk".
Windows XP is aware that the camera is connected as shows in the Safely
Remove Hardware wizard although not in device manager. The USB ports work
fine with other devices including flash drives.
The camera works perfectly in a relatives (older and less powerful) XP Pro
machine.
Can anyone suggest a fix because it is a real pain to have to borrow someone
else's PC to transfer my pictures. I can not use a card reader because this
has corrupted a previous card.