XP wrongly and always ignores a working MS mouse on specific USB port

On connecting a known good MS Optical Mouse to certain USB ports on my P4 XP/SP3 machine it is completely ignored. When I try a different USB port the mouse is recognised immediately. The original USB port works with other peripherals attached to it.

It appears to me that XP keeps a record of devices to ignore, even though it may have made a wrong assumption of such devices? I want to override this.

How do I clear XP’s knowledge of redundant and wrongly recognised devices.

Are there tools available that will purge the hardware 'history' from XP so that connecting a previouslt connected USB device will behave as if it's being connected for the first time?

Tim

I' have 'hidden devices' viewable under Device Manager but I have had some trouble in the ambiguous naming of the plethora of USB entries. These are names that do not enable me to attribute specific entries to known hardware.

I'm hopeful that some kind of driver pruning tool might go some way to clarifying. A common problem is that I will delete a certain wrongly identified hardware entry but then, after a reboot, the entry returns back as before - And still the wrong hardware is being identified.

I seem to need a 'forget-about-this-forever' facility to tell XP that it's got it wrong so that the next time XP reboots it will see the hardware as if for the first time and ask for the driver or do what XP does with newly experienced hardware.