VIsta 64 - disappearing USB ports

Is Vista still full of bugs after all this time? I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't have stayed on XP. The other day my firewire drives just disappeared, not even listed in disk management. Just not seen by Vista whatsoever. I found out the drives were ok by testing them on another computer. It was something with Vista. Now the drives have magically reappeared, though I didn't make any changes. Before they wouldn't show up; now they do.

But now something new has happened: all of my USB ports have stopped working except these two I use for my keyboard and mouse. My Antec 300 has two USBs in the front and 8 in the back. The only ones which will work are the two in the third row down. And apparently they are not registering as 2.0 because if I unplug my keyboard and put my iPod in I get a message "this device can run faster."

At first I was afraid the motherboard was defective; but I booted up from the Ubuntu disc: all of my USB ports were operational running under that OS, all my devices recognized when I connected them. So it is indeed Vista 64.

If I open the Device Manager I see the dreaded yellow triangle next to 7 of the "Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller"s

One is ok. And the "USB Composite device" and "USB root hub" are ok. But I have no idea what to do to get my USB ports working again.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ok, it seems I spoke to soon.

USB ports all seemed functional, but as soon as I began plugging in devices and rearranging positions everything went haywire. When I put my mouse and keyboard in different ports, they slowed to a halt. I then rebooted my system, went back to device manager and saw once again all the yellow triangles were back.

Not sure what to do at this point. It seems just connecting and disconnecting USB devices or changing their ports is enough to make my USB stop working.