littlebeartoe

I had a similar problem on a ~2-year-old Alienware desktop running WinXP Pro: most USB devices were working fine, but the WiFi adapter spontaneously started dropping the connection. When I tried to reset it, it seemed to become incompatible with the mouse-- that is, the mouse cursor would freeze when the WiFi was plugged in. I worked that problem a bit using some of the techniques described above in this thread, and pretty soon Windows simply refused to recognize the adapter at all, or even another one like it, even though I had tested both successfully on another machine. Anyway, I grew fed up and decided to assume the problem was the USB hardware. I bought new 4-port USB PCI card for about $8 via Amazon. Problem solved in record time. There are lots of cheap USB cards: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+pci Not much help to notebook users, I know, but if you have a PCMCIA slot, you could buy a card for that: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+pcmcia My solution was so cheap that I didn't mind giving it a shot even if the problem turned out to be OS- or driver-related. Maybe it was. But now it's working, and I'm happy.