I had an accident involving a liquid spilled on my old laptop!! This meant a very quick mopping up exercise and removal of leads including my DSL modem connected to the USB port. The laptop eventually recovered after several days drying out!!

I am running Windows 2000 (I said it was an old laptop!! ) therefore this would have been an "unsafe" removal of the device.

Now when I plug in a memory stick or the DSL modem, although there is power indicated, the device is not recognised. This is what I have in Device Manager (when no devices are plugged in) ...

- Universal Serial Bus controllers
|- Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Host Controller
|- (!) USB Device
|- USB Root Hub

The (!) is a black exclamation on a yellow background, and it tells me when I right-click on USB Device "The drivers for this device are not installed (Code 28)". I tried re-installing the drivers, but it gave me a message saying "the installation failed because a function driver was not specified for this device instance."

Am I right in thinking that the USB Device highlighted in red above should not be there, and I need to uninstall it (possibly in safe mode), restart the laptop, and then try plugging in a memory stick or other USB device again?

I think this must be left over from the unsafe removal in my haste to get the liquid off the laptop!!

The cause of this problem is most likely the USB port is now defective. It is working enough to where the unit realizes there is a USB port, but broken enough that it is unable to install the drivers.

That whole "unplug the device safely" thing just means that if you unplug the device while it is active (for example, copying data to a flash drive) then you might screw up the data that is being copied. You don't have to use the safely remove hardware feature if you know the device is inactive. All that does is stop whatever tasks the device is doing, which most of the time is nothing.

I have had many devices in my experience act just like you are saying. For example, yesterday, I had a built in wireless adapter show up in the device manager with an exclamation point. The unit recognized a device was plugged in, it even recognized the brand, but every possible attempt at installing it failed which just indicates the device or the port is defective.

So if you plug in a few different USB devices and they all act the exact same way, I would be pretty sure to say the USB port itself is bad.

Thanks for the reply, and I fear you may be right. I have actually bought a super duper new laptop running Windows Vista, so I only need this port working to copy data off the old laptop (I can also connect and set up an old external CD writer that I have to do that job).

I have seen a number of other posts referring to similar issues which involve uninstalling the USB device entries in Device Manager in Safe Mode, so I think I will try that before concluding that the USB port is now defective.

I tried right-clicking on the USB Device which is not working and uninstalled it but after rebooting Windows 2000 just re-installed it and then gave me the same error about the missing function driver. So the USB port is still not working.

I scanned for hardware changes, but that reported nothing.

I could try uninstalling the USB device, root hub, and universal host controller so that the entire stack is rebuilt?

Any ideas anyone?