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I have three identical HP desktop machines all running XP Pro SP2 and all running almost the same software and hardware. One of these machines seems to have lost the ability to discover any connected USB devices.
I've lived with this problem for a while but I can't any more, I'm fed up copying files across the network to another machine just so I can then copy them off onto a USB stick or external HDD.
The thing that makes the problem strange is that my USB mouse works in any and all of the USB ports but nothing else does. The only device showing up with a yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager is an Unknown Device under "Mice and other pointing devices" - it would seem that the mouse was recognised before any problems arose and that would explain why it continues to work.
I plug in a USB stick and I get the "New Hardware Found" wizard pop up - it runs through looking for drivers/devices and finds nothing at all. It does this on every single boot and finds nothing at all each time.
The normally excellent HP Customer (dis)Service's answer was to reinstall Windows (much like AOL's answer of reinstalling AOL every time something goes wrong) and as easy as this is, I'm a little loath to go through the processes when clearly something (the mouse) works. This may of course be for the reason above.
My question is, what do I try next?
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