Sophora

Scagnetty: Man, if it's something as simple as spreading out your devices...mine have all been recognized since before my last post, and through a couple of reboots. I have wireless keyboard/mouse. These are the only usb devices never to cause a problem throughout this whole thing. Then there's the 250gb external hdd and the card reader. (I'm never going to stick that ipod shuffle in a usb port again.) So I'll try to keep them all spread out all over the darn place and see if that keeps them all functioning. We're going to try your crazy fix. BTW: I'm interested in hearing more about your auto daily backup. Is that all you use your external hdd for? How long does it take? How long did the first time take? Did you back up lots of media files? Should this be a new topic?

It makes perfect sense. But I don't know how to tell if any of my devices are 1.1...also, if I have a 3.06Ghz P4, I would assume that all the ports are 2.0, but I acknowledge that may be an unsafe assumption. Scagnetty: your situation, while somewhat different, still has me blaming one device along the way for the origin of the problem. In your case it may have been the mouse...or it may have been the KVM switch itself. Are any of the devices in question used, by chance? (Allow me to continue my paranoid skepto-phrenic vein: Is there a "design obsolescence" bug geared at causing us all to march down in frustration and buy new devices? Hence the prolonged silence from those who could fix it?)

Baseball: my crystal ball says it was a combination of the ipod and the sauerkraut. Get it? Sauerkraut::Hot Dogs, Hot Dogs::Baseball. OK, somebody else take a crack at bringing some levity to this frustrating topic.

Well, at the moment the devices in question are working! I did none of the things Kain and others did, simply because of reading everybody's frustration. Twice now the USB ports turned up functioning, both times have been under the following circumstance: I haven't restarted, hibernated, shut down, etc. for about 72 hours. Yesterday morning I jumped bright eyed out of bed and checked and the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon was present in my tray. With mounting suspense I clicked My Computer and Lo! the Card Reader was present, the External Hard Drive was present! Yeeeha. At any rate: I have until next restart to get a bunch of stuff done.

Baseball, Kain, DJblackbeer: In your research, what would you guess is the oldest occurrence of this problem? It seems pretty recent to me (less than 4 months for most people). Are we dealing with a previously undiscovered bug that is carried on otherwise innocuous usb devices? I certainly alters the hardware somehow, because as I noted: even my Linux OS doesn't read the devices. There are regedit fixes out there that lead nowhere. I wonder if there's a commonality in that some of us (Sophora, Kain) seem to trace the problem to devices purchases used (and perhaps wiped before we got them (?)). I can't help but think that this seems to be getting bigger as more people encounter it (virus, trojan, worm? crazy ol' me...) If that's the case, then a REAL fix ought to be forthcoming.

Clueless, What about you? can you narrow down your malfunction to one particular device? (sounds kinda like an insult...)

Kain, Thanks for the reply. Mine isn't on an HP either. It's on a self-built, 3.06Ghz P4. Just curious: did you acquire your problem mp3 player new in box? My offending ipod shuffle was an open box return. DJBlackbeer: can you narrow down the origin of your problem to a particular device?

I just can't bring myself to be angry with USB ports, because I know the problem started with one ipod shuffle. This is the single most baffling (computer) problem I have ever encountered. "USB Device Not Recognized"

Dear Kain, Am I paranoid, or are we using devices that are deliberately bugged to cause this problem? If you check the dates when the "USB Device Not Recognized" error began showing up on forums, they're mostly all pretty recent. No wonder HP support and everybody else is perplexed, and that every solution out there only works temporarily if at all. My problem, like yours, has been fixing and unfixing itself randomly. I know for a fact the problem began when trying set up my ebay purchased ipod shuffle. From then on any camera, card reader, external hard drive or mp3 player has given me the "USB Device Not Recognized" error. Only once has it "fixed" itself. I did not format and reinstall XPHome, but I did install a dual boot Linux OS (Simply Mepis, which I use and love on another machine). Guess what: it didn't recognize the devices either!!! I'm searching for a new motherboard. Boy will I be crestfallen if that doesn't work either!