USB Issues on my Dell XPS

[PackerFanatic]

Alright, I have been dicking around on Google for hours trying to find something to help me, so I thought I would get the brains around here working with me to see if maybe I am overlooking something. I don't know when it happened, but the USB ports (front and back) suddenly stopped working recently. I probably noticed it first when my wife and I got new phones and I tried to plug the phone into the system. The phone would charge, but I could never get the PC to recognize the phone. Then suddenly everytime I would boot up the PC, I would get a "Found New Hardware" wizard for the device named Unknown. Couldn't find any drivers to install (of course) Shortly after this, my wife plugged our digital camera into the PC and it wouldn't recognize that either. iPod, printer, external HDD, nothing will get recognized (although like the phone, the iPod still charges) Now I occasionally get a "USB device was not recognized" error in the system tray, when I click it, it says it is an unknown USB device. I have since unplugged all my USB devices and I haven't seen that pop up (yet) so who knows if that is related (I am sure it is)

It is just quite baffling, and I am sure that sounded like rambling, heh, but if anyone has run into something like this or has ideas, let me know. I am running Windows XP Home (it's actually "Media Center" edition, the copy that came with the machine) I do have the option to reinstall Windows if I need to, but if this is a hardware problem, it won't matter. I have upgraded my BIOS, and installed the newest chipset drivers that I could find on Dell's website.

[Marc Vaughan]

If it helps I've found that my DELL precision has 5 USB connections BUT only two of them are USB 2.0 connections, the others only work with slow speed devices - for other devices you'll get a charge trickle but no connection.

(the fast speed connections are the 2 left most ones at the back on my laptop its possible that this is the case for you also)

[fantom1979]

What does it say in your device manager? You should see some devices listed under the Universal Serial Bus Controllers sub menu. Are there any there? Is there anything in there listed as an unknown device?

[PackerFanatic]

When I get the 'Found New Hardware' wizard (every time I start up), the 'unknown device' goes under my System Devices. When I get the 'USB device not recognized' error, I get the unknown device under the USB controllers menu. I have tried uninstalling all of those and letting Windows find them all again, but no luck there either.

[PackerFanatic]

Well it looks like I got rid of the Unknown Device (it had something to with Intel's Quick Resume Technology that somehow got enabled on my MOBO and it couldn't find the drivers for it - so I just disabled it)

But my USB ports still don't do a damn thing when I plug something in - any help would be appreciated.