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gorman1979

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USB Devices Ask For Drivers When They Are Not Required

When I connect a usb device to my computer running Windows XP it displays the driver installation box then searches for drivers and reports that it cannot find suitable drivers.

This happens with every usb device from mice to usb flash drives to printers.

While printers obviously need drivers the mice and usb flash drives should automatically find the correct drivers in Windows.

can any body shed some light on this problem?
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simpswr
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Look in Device Manager to see if any of the USB Controllers have a yellow ! beside them . . if so, you can download and run current chipset and USB drivers for your motherboard.

Right CLick on My Computer . . select Manage . . Device Manager

wrs
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gorman1979

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all the devices are showing up as fine in device manager.

When a ps2 mouse is plugged in it comes up as unknown device
do the items work when they are plugged in?
does windows go thru the plug & play set when you plug them in?
Do yo have full administrative rights to the workstation, I noticed that some hardware devices prompt you to install the device instead of just going through the installation process.  If this is the same problem I had; I made the following changes in the Local Group Policy:

In the Local Computer Policy | Computer Configuration | Windows Settings | Security Settings | User Rights Assignment | “Load and unload device drivers” you might want to try adding their accounts to this security setting, this may fix the problem.

Chookisa - no the devices do not work, yesterday I did the (with hindsight) stupid thing of removing all USB ports in device manager in the hope that they would reinstall and work correctly - now of course they will not install keeps saying a suitable driver could not be found.

badmanjj - yep I have full admin rights and also tried logging in to the admin account but the problem still exists


Note: #i am increasing the points value for this question  beacuse it a tough one
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badmanjj

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Did you try reloading chipset and USB Drivers?

wrs
okay major update thanks to badmanjj the inf folder is there and I managed to get the usb ports to install by selecting install from a specific location and pointing it straight at the c:\windows\inf folder.

So how can I get XP to automatically look at the inf folder when it is trying to automatically install, I assume its a registry change or something

Look in the registry for the the key below:  (check to see if it exist, if it does, check to see if the security permissions are set correctly, I once had a virus/spyware make some annoying changes to my permissions in my reg)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath: REG_EXPAND_SZ:%SystemRoot%\Inf

Hope this helps.
thankyou to every one who contributed to solving this problem, special thanks to badmanjj :)