Thanks, but that link was for sandisk drives only.
However, I was able to answer my own question.
While verbatim does not provide a u3 recovery, they did have a vista patch for my drive. http://www.verbatim.com/downloads/U3/u3upd...verbatim_us.exe
Should I have wanted to completely remove u3 from the drive, I could have used:
http://www.u3.com/uninstall/
All my original files are still intact. and now I have the added side effect of being able to read the thumb drive on a Vista computer. sweetness.