All righty, since you beautiful people out there have helped me so much with my dirty dirty computers, I thought I might come here for a little off-topic advice. Especially because the Microsoft community forums seem pretty worthless in this situation, even though LOTS of people seem to be having the same problem.
I was using a usb wireless adapter on my Vista system and shut it down when it hung up (silly me running Illustrator and Photoshop CS3 at the same time), only to find on reboot that my adapter had spontaneously uninstalled itself. Plugging it in produced a "device malfunction...not recognized" blah-de-blah message. I spent almost an hour on the phone with the NetGear people before I realized I was getting the same message for any USB device on every port. My adapter, my camera, my multifunction printer, nothing works! This problem seems to have happened to a lot of people, included XP users, but none of the fixes out there seem to help me. I've deleted infcache something or 'nother, and gotten hotfixed out the yingyang, and manually installed all kinds of drivers for all kinds of devices, and nothing seems to work. Any help?

what are the errors in event viewer logs?
any ? or ! marks listed in Device Manager?

Cudni

There is an error for the ATI I/O Communications Processor USB 2.0 EHCI controller: This device cannot start. (Code 10)
But I am pretty sure this didn't happen until I tried to fix the problem, rather than being the problem. I can't fix this self-inflicted problem either, though I haven't tried all that hard, but I did try uninstalling and re-installing the device. I kind of gave up after fooling around with all the mess for a few days when I had to finish a project and couldn't deal with it anymore. All the other USB controllers are fine, although there is an Unknown Device in there with them that I can't identify. At one point in my struggles, I deleted a lot of ghost unknown devices, but this one lingers on. I can't find any hardware events in the event viewer, but I am very unfamiliar with Vista, and am not completely sure where all I should be looking.

maybe consider repairing the install
http://vistasupport.mvps.org/windows_vista_repair_options.htm


Cudni

Wow, I didn't even realize Vista was so different from XP. Is this like a re-install? Will I lose my files? 'Cause I can't back up to an external hard drive (it's USB )! There are hundreds of people with the same problem as me out there, if you do a little googling, and no real solutions. I realize that hundreds of people are just a fraction of a percentage of the Vista users out there, but I really wish Microsoft would address this problem. Maybe in that semi-mythical SP1? I can only hope. Thanks for your help. Maybe I will try to repair, although I now remember atleast one other searcher out there who tried it and had no luck. I wondered what they meant by "Vista Repair".

you shouldn't lose files with first option listed here
http://www.windowsvista.windowsreinstall.com/vistaultimate/repairstartup/index.htm
it might not do anything though as in fix the issue you are having

Cudni

Once i left my iPod plugged into my computer.

The next day i went to turn my PC on.. It failed to load windows, just had a black screen..

I couldn't work out what was wrong.. I took off the iPod, and it started up!??

strange.