I did read this from the Avid forum. That's where I got my information. Of course it's for external drives, that's why I talked about Firewire and USB for audio files in the OP.
There were problems seen with the Win7 firewire drivers when used with firewire drives - problems like yours and a few others, thus we could only qualify SATA and USB drives (USB is much better under Win7 than it was with WinXP). eSATA would also likely work (many reports of people using it without issues), though we didn't specifically test it enough to consider it 'qualified'.
As for the 'drive names with more than 11 characters' - just change the name of any NTFS volumes (drives) to something 11 characters or less.
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