Endless Paradigm

OK, I've had this problem for a while now. Its not a big problem as its easy to work around but its a little annoying.

Whenever I plug in a piece of hardware (USB) like a mouse or a flash drive XP will come up with the Found New Hardware Wizard. Normally, for something like a flash drive, XP will recognize what it is and do all the legwork for you with no user input whatsoever. But XP will always ask whether I want to connect to the internet, install automatically etc etc. Its easy to get around because I just choose No connecting to the internet, and Yes to install automatically. It will come up regardless of whether that piece of hardware has been plugged in before or not.

For a flash drive its particularly annoying because A) its the most commonly plugged-in piece of hardware on my computer and B) because i have to go through the Wizard 3 times. Once for Mass Storage Device, once for Drive and once for Volume.

An undefined amount of E-Pigs for whoever can solve this.


EDIT: Just remembered something else. When XP is installing the driver for the device I will get a warning saying the driver isn't digitally signed even though the driver that's being installed came with XP. I would expect the components of XP not to provoke such a warning. Just goes to prove Windows sucks.

somebody removed your generic USB drivers? ...

idk

i don't understand it much either :)

No, the drivers are still there. Once I tell XP to install the device it finds and installs the drivers fine. The problem is that XP should do this automatically without any input from me.

I know someone that had this issue


Well i don't actually know what caused it to happen, the problem lies in the fact that the drivers have been replaced with unsigned ones, which windows won't automatically install. Resinstalling the Generic USB driver should fix the issue

why don't you do what you normally do and reinstall xp?

andrewcc Wrote:why don't you do what you normally do and reinstall xp?

Because its only within the last few days that I've got everything back to normal after the last re-install.

Anyone know of a way of restoring XP's generic drivers?

best guess would be to go into device manager, click on usb devices option and roll back drivers. I've had similar probs in the past. Usually it happens when you update windows or forget to update windows. Since you've just gotten your rig back in order, I'd check to see if you're fully up to speed with all of the service pack updates including SP2. Sometimes programs will work with SP1 but only half way. I had an issue with Object Dock where it would function no problems but it wouldn't let me add any new shortcut icons. essentially it was running at bare bones until I updated to SP2.

I'm currently on SP3. I'll try the roll back.

he he lately my xp sp3 computer doesn't even recognize my mouse...

it is fun trying to navigate without it...
NOT

the only thing i can't do without a mouse is play UnrealTournament (which i don't often do) and surf the interwebs. for everything else i just use the keyboard.