malloy

Hullo! Hope people still read this thread. I am a new member of this not so exclusive club where the price of admission, sadly, is a non working USB device. Was running a four year old generic Xp Pro machine 2.4Pentium with 768MB RAM on an Asus board. Have a year old HP laserJet 3050 running smoothly until last week when I got the "USB device not recognized" message. Tried to reinstall the software, installation would not continue. Tried installing on a Toshiba Satellite running Vista Basic laptop same thing. - Got the updated drivers for vista, no go. - unlplugged the machines a few hours, no good - copied and recopied the USB inf files on system 32 - made a new entry inregistry with the key on both machines - tried fixing the XP with the fix me patch on microsoft, no good - deleted the USB control panel entries manually in safe mode I've done just about everything short of getting on my knees and praying for it to work. If I had bottomless pockets, I'd take a hammer and a blowtorch to the machines and FeEex the remains back to Microsoft. Also checked out the windows MSDN dev't site, none of their fixes worked! I have used the same HP printer on an old Compaq 5423 US series with USB 1.1 ports running Windows XP for over a year without any problems. had to migrate to another system since the old Compaq crashed and WINDOWS REFUSED TO BE REINSTALLED, but that is another story. had a replacement USB cable on hand just in case. Printer works fine and detected sans any drama on another PC with Linux Puppy 4.2 and Kubuntu 9.04. The funny thing is, I tried the HP printer on a Windows 98 Compaq circa 1999 machine and it worked! All other USb devices such as USB modem, camera, flash disks, so far ( but I'm keeping my fingers crossed) still work. This is obviosly a windows XP, Vista and USB 2.0 problem. Those top level employees and developers at Microsoft probably just buy new hardware when they encounter this and sweep it under the carpet. Everyone knows MS software is full of bugs but this is unbelievable!