I highly highly doubt that the drive itself is "dead". Especially if windows is still recognizing it. Instead, you probably interrupted a cached write to the drive or some such, and the file system is now corrupted. It might still be possible to save some of the data on the drive if you're determined and want to muck around with it. This has some info:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic45947.html
and this might help:
http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/flash_drive_recovery.asp
You could also try downloading Knoppix or the Ultimate Boot CD and booting into Linux and seeing if you can read or format the drive from there.
EDIT: Heck, if it's not supremely urgent or highly personal, you could mail it down here to Texas and I'd muck with it for ya.