Computer help- USB's stopped working

[wwwgator]

Hey Brain Trust,
  working diligently last night on my show laptop when it lost all but 2 of my usb ports.
 The two that it says work will not recognise the usb mouse pulgged in. I do have 5VDC at the port ( mouse lights up/ thumb drive shows boot up, but fails to talk to the laptop.
 
There is 1 unknown device in the usb list- removed it, but then it refound it.

I'd add a screen shot but there is no way to export the picture till I get home from work

Anything I should be looking at???

[rm357]

There is a power setting that will allow the USB ports to go to sleep if they don't get something from the device every so often. Unfortunately, the USB dongle does not provide that and the computer doesn't register the outgoing data as being in use...

Look under the power settings and disable anything that looks like USB sleep.

[injury]

You didn't mention the age of the laptop but in addition to the USB sleep some older XP machines used to have a problem where the USB would disappear. Going into device manager and removing the USB ports/hub then letting them redetect and reinstall would solve it til it happened again.

[jnealand]

I have also found that "lost" usb ports could be rest by removing all power from the computer for a couple of minutes and then plugging it all back up and booting up.  I've had this work several times.  By removing all power that means unplugging from the wall and for a laptop removing the battery while unplugged.  A simple restart will not do it.  Has something to do with capacitors holding a charge while any power is still connected.

Simple to try.  May or may not work in your situation.

[chrisatpsu]

A lot of times, if you have frequently plugged something in and out over the course of a period of time, eventually you can get to the point of the usb driver was still loaded when you unplugged something, which can effective disable the computer's ability to recognize items plugged in.

just in case you haven't tried, just rebooting the computer will clear that up.

[wwwgator]

Well one of the above worked....not sure which one because I did all of them pretty much all at the same time.
First , I always disable sleep modes when on house power- reset power config anyway
Second rebooted machine all the way down to complete power off ( battery removed too)
Third- disabled the USB host controller- then rescanned for hardware changes

Thanks for all input..... so the machine can generate output !!!