DDS3 tape drive disappears in WinXPP

This is on WinXPpro SP2 (problem occurred prior to upgrade. I have a Seagate DDS3 DAT drive. The Adaptec SCSI adapter recognizes it fine. It shows up in device manager correctly as an OK device that is available, but any application that has to recognize it (such as Backup Exec, NTbackup etc) doesn’t. I uninstalled the device and the drivers, and downloaded the latest driver for XP. Ecec software Tapeware, which has it’s own drivers works OK, but it is not my choice for workstation backup. For a brief period of a couple of weeks, the issue seemed to have resolved itself, then the tape drive became invisible to the software again. I have also made sure the removable device service was running, with no change. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks, Jim