This is an older gateway that I use for business purporses. Lost power the other night and the USB ports no longer work. I uninstalled the drivers and the usb and then restarted allowing the system to "see" that they were no longer installed and it did a fresh install and update. The problem is that it does not work. Device manager says the devices are working properly but I get no connectivity from any usb device. My usb memory stick won't access it either. Anyone have an idea as to what went wrong and how to correct it?

Your USB2 drivers are usually with the chipset drivers that came with your mainboard and must be loaded separately. I am not sure if you have separate mainboard driver disk or not, but if not perhaps Gateway will have them on their website for download. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.

[PS to my comment above]: What I mean is that I know that USB2 drivers also come with SP2 but it doesn't appear that you have SP2 installed from your computer from what you detail in your post. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.

Judging by the specs of your PC I guess you haven't got USB2.0 anyway so the XP drivers should be quite happy identifying your ports correctly. You say there's no connectivity - so when you attach anything there's no hourglass, beep or whatever? If you uninstalled them and Windows re-recognised them then it's more likely a power problem rather than a data problem so it could just be a pure hardware failure. Once you've checked for certain that the peripherals you're using are definitely ok then trying to repair on-board I/O ports is risky & uneconomic. If it's a tower system I'd suggest spending £10 or so on a new USB2 PCI card & get the benefit of the higher speed ports. "I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

Good advice above but before doing anything else be aware that Windows is kind of dumb sometimes, as you know. Windows says yours USB ports work when they don't. Boot into safe mode and remove all instances of the USB ports that are listed there. Sometimes there can be multiple instances of the same hardware installed. That messes things up. You could also try a system restore to a previous state. No harm in trying, in case this is a sofware problem. The fact that windows says the USB ports work kind of indicates to me that Windows can at least see the controllers. If you download the correct drivers from gateway you could try updating the drivers thru device manager.

Thanks johnr and Othehill. I have worked diligently on your suggestions and come to the conclusion that it is a power issue. Thanks for the suggestions and help. I do appreciate it.

on some motherboards there are fuses for ps2 connectors & also for usbs. on some of those boards with fuses there are 2 different types of fuses, flat which reset afer a certain amount of time & cylindrical that looks like a resister with a black band around the body. you might have blown that cylindrical body type fuse or your motherboard might not have fuses on it but jumper wires instead which means you blew a component on the motherboard. also check the motherboard & look at all the metal top cans mounted to the motherboard, those are a type of capacitor that should be flat top not domed, if domed or leaking brown stuff that could be your problem david