I lost my USB ports a few days ago and having tried everything I could find on the net (short of re-installing Windows) the following worked for me: Enter your BIOS during boot and look for 'Legacy USB Ports'. The setting was ENABLED and out of interest I changed it to DISABLED, my USB ports are now working again! I hadn't touched my BIOS settings prior to losing USB and 'restoring defaults' in my BIOS ENABLED Legacy USB. I'm running Windows XP Home on a Fujitsu Siemens AMILO Pro notebook. Good luck. Nigel