Posted 07 March 2011 - 10:03 AM
I'm working on a Dell Dimension 3000 and have a problem I've never seen before.
I loose my USB ports after the OS boots up.
I can boot from the hard drive (WinXP) and anything I plug into the USB won't work.
I can boot from a CD to WinXP and the same thing happens.
The really interesting part is, I can boot from a USB Data key to WinXP, and once XP takes over as the OS, my ports no longer work. At this point I'm running off a ram drive.
I checked the ports to see if I could see a problem like maybe a short inside, even blew them out to remove the dust, but no luck.
Other issues are that the computer is running very slow..
SysInternals Process Explorer tells me that the problem is "thread ID 108" with a start address of USBPORT.SYS+0x6086. It's keeping the CPU busy at 90-95% and clicking off "Context Switches" like mad (up over 700,000 so far). I really don't understand what all that techy talk means, so any suggestions will help.
I've scanned with AVG, Malware Bytes, HiJack This, run CCleaner, Loaded MSConfig and set to Diagnostic mode. No viruses were found, the other programs cleaned up some junk, but nothing important.
How can the system boot using a USB drive, but once up & running, the ports don't work?