Found an issue today with my 5300c. It came with a VST branded internal Zip drive. But the drive seems to have some issues or is not getting along with my 5300c. I have the driver from the VST package on Macintosh Garden installed. The issues:
If I leave the Zip drive out of the laptop and/or use an internal floppy drive instead - system works perfectly.
If the Zip drive is installed in the laptop but there is no zip disk in the drive - during boot, after all the extensions have loaded, and the Finder is about to show up (control strip has popped up already), there's a 30-60 second hang before Finder finally shows up and I see the drive icons. Also after the Finder shows up, I get these weird hangs every once in a while. It will hang for about 5-10 seconds (cursor moves but the rest of the Finder doesn't respond including windows, menus, etc). If I was in the middle of dragging a window, the window gets frozen on the screen until the hang goes away and then everything catches up.
If the Zip drive is installed in the laptop and there is a zip disk in the drive - everything seems to work ok.
The only version of the VST enabled Zip driver I can find is versioned 1.0. I couldn't find any other driver for it. Either something is wrong with the drive or something is wrong with the driver. The standard iomega zip driver doesn't seem to work as with those standard versions, the drive isn't detected (I know because the iomega drive options CDEV says there's no zip drive) and also inserting a zip disk does nothing.