My laptop's USB behaves erratically. It sometimes will just stop working, meaning that plugging things into them results with nothing, even though it shows up as running fine in the device manager. Usually, I can circumvent this by just uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers. Now though, the same thing has happened, but I cannot get anything to work anymore. Specific problem: -Cannot use a usb thumb drive; I plug it in, but nothing happens I've tried reinstalling usb drivers numerous times, as well as restarting, but to no avail. Also, the thumb drive is not defective, as it works completely fine on my other computer. Any ideas?

If the thumb drive is the only USB device not working, it's possible that its been assigned a drive letter that's already in use. I've seen this a number of times, particularly when there are mapped network drives present. Right click My Computer and click on Manage. Then click on Disk Management and see if the thumb drive is listed there. If so, you can right click on it and change the drive letter to one that is unused. I hope that's the problem.

Thanks for the input; unfortunately, it seems that anything connected to the usb ports won't work: thumb drive, my mouse, etc. I'd assume that the usb ports are bad, but Device Manager reports that they're working properly. O_o

And ideas? (short of doing a complete reinstall using the restore discs...)