Okay I am frustrated as my new keyboard (Zboard MERC) and joystick (Logitech Attack 3) will not install or even be recognized by my hardware wizard on my WinXP Home SP2 machine. They are both PnP USB devices but both come up as “Unknown Device” via Device Manager.

I have installed the joystick on an outdated laptop with WinXP Pro with no problems whatsoever. From what I can tell it uses the HID-compliant game controller 5.1.2600.1106 driver which I cannot seem to be able to find on MicroSh!ts website nor via the internetz. I planned on grabbing the driver off of the laptop and installing it on my desktop but it seems I already have that driver on my machine which it should be the “hidusb.sys (USB Miniport Driver for Input Devices)” from my WINDOWS\system32\drivers folder.

The only thing I can possible think of is that my mobo (Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3) is not backwards compatible to USB 1.1 although there is an option via the BIOS which I checked and tried with no luck whatsoever. My only conclusion that I can think of is for me to try a PCI USB card that is USB 1.1 or at least one that is truly backwards compatible.

Please help as almost completely fed up and about to return my new keyboard and joystick. Thank you to anyone willing to take the time to help and me look forward to all helpful replies.

First, that may not be the driver. Usually drivers are .inf files. Have you tried installing the drivers from the Windows/system32/ driver folder through Hardware Manager?

As I suspected it was the USB interface on my new mobo. Here is the simple fix for others that may be experiencing this issue. The legacy bus drivers on these newer mobos are not backwards compatible, where via chipset works, so get a PCI USB card which has worked for me.