Clock loses time with external mouse or keyboard connected

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (More info?)

This notebook computer loses several hours of time when I plug in an external
keyboard or mouse. I've installed a clean installation of Windows XP Pro SP2
on a spare hard drive and the problem disappears, but I really want to try to
fix the problem before wiping out all of my programs, etc.
The system also stalls for several seconds at a time, the mouse pointer and
keyboard freezes periodically, then comes back. I'm running latest Norton, MS
Antispyware, Ad-Aware, Spybot, all come back clean. I've killed all
background processes, still not solved. Any ideas?