5punk

A friend of mine is having a bizarre problem with his XP home machine, the device manager is totally blank (he also can't use any USB devices other than his printer. iPod, webcam etc)

I've had a trawl through on the interwebs and the only things I can see are access rights in a particular part of the registry and switching PnP on or off and neither of these things worked.

Anyone got any ideas as to what could be up with it? He's installed and removed several webcam software drivers in the last week and it had SP3 on it, I got rid of this but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. (Also nothing was showing up in device manager when I booted it to safe mode)

Ta!

Very odd.

Tried http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1134095035 ?

maybe sfc /scannow ?

Cheers Mr Berk, I had a look on that site but that is the most comprehensive post so far. Did try the sfc thing but didn't have the cd to hand but I will get him to have another try at that

Some rather unsubtle registry worms do this I think. Unlikely I know, but just another idea to try out.