Dead USB

Hi all:

Asus P5B mobo, home built a coupla years ago. In addition to the regular USB ports, it has an expansion card in the back with an add'l 4 USB ports. I dabble in photography so I have 2 printers, 2 scanners, etc etc. Need a lot of USB ports.

When I put this together, I installed a drive bay with a floppy drive and a card/media reader, all in one. It hooked up to the 9pin USB plug on the mobo. Recently the SD slot stopped working. So, not wanting to do this myself, I took it to a local tech, who installed another media card reader that I supplied, which also hooked into the 9pin mobo USB slot.

Everything worked fine for a coupla days, then it simply stopped working. iow when the computer booted, it didn't show the drives for the card reader. It was getting power tho, the little led light was on.

So I figured no biggie, I'd just open up the computer and pull the drive and figure it out later. However, ever since I pulled the drive, the rest of the USB ports are crazy. I've done some experimentation to narrow it down, but I can't solve it.

What happens is I get a constant and annoying taskbar popup message that tells me one of the devices connected to a usb port is bad, that if re-connecting doesn't solve the problem I need to replace the device. Of course I've checked all the devices and they are working fine, and I get the error msg even with nothing connected.

When I go into the Device Manager (XP Pro, btw) I've tried disabling one of the two "Intel ICH8 family USB enhanced host controller 2836. " That solves the message and allows the ports to work but XP tells me they are slow and I should use an enhanced port instead. And indeed d/l photos from a memory card is very slow.

Then I re-enabled the controller and tried disabling each USB Root Hub (there are 10) in turn. I found one that seems to be part of the problem and have disabled it.

What that does is, I don't get the popup message and I can use the 4 USB ports in the installed card in the back of the PC, but I can't use ANY of the ports native to the mobo. They simply don't work. When I re-enable the USB Root Hub, I can use all the ports, and at normal high speed, but I keep getting the popup.

So what I'm doing for now is using the four external USB ports in the card for the stuff I use all the time, and if I need another port to do something like d/l photos, I enable the usb root hub, deal with the popups, and disable it again when finished.

Any ideas on this? I went thru the bios and didn't see anything out of the ordinary.