Disk I/O error when getting list of books on Kobo Glo HD

I have a Kobo Glo HD and I have been using Calibre for my book management for years.

I have just upgraded to Win 10 from Win 7. I have two problems:

1. I am not able to install above version 5.44 as Calibre gives an "QT not present" error.

2. Calibre always gives an I/O error whenever I plugin the Kobo when the "job" getting list of books on the device. This is the error I get.

calibre, version 3.48.0
ERROR: Error: Error communicating with device

IOError: disk I/O error

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 90, in run
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 513, in _books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\kobo\driver.py", line 1841, in books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\kobo\driver.py", line 187, in get_database_version
File "c:\t\t\apsw-mc0now\apsw-3.27.2-r1\src\cursor.c", line 1019, in APSWCursor_execute.sqlite3_prepare
File "c:\t\t\apsw-mc0now\apsw-3.27.2-r1\src\statementcache.c", line 386, in sqlite3_prepare
IOError: IOError: disk I/O error


Although this has been has been happening on and off since some time time back, this is now happening consistently with all versions. I am back to version 3.48 but still the same results.

I have factory reset my Kobo but it has not helped. Moreover, even after reset, the "collections" were not deleted. They displayed 0 books, but they were all there even after 3 reset cycles!!

Please help me resolve this. Calibre has been my go to app for my ebook management but this is driving me crazy!