One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned

"One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it."

First of all, I was finding that whenever I transferred music from my itunes to a usb thumbdrive, so i could play them in my car stereo, on playback, half the tracks were corrupted. They'd change volume halfway through, or be cut off at the end, or even suddenly swap to a completely different artist and song.

Pretty soon after that, I was finding that whenever I inserted a thumbdrive into the PC, I got the message:

"One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it."

It was a nightmare to figure out what the hell was wrong, suspected the thumbdrive itself at first, then the car stereo, then the PC hardware.. nearly went round the bend searching for a solution but in the end it turned out to be fairly easy to fix.

All you need to do, is re-install the driver for the errant usb device.

However, there's 2 gotchas.

Firstly, when the usb device is not present, or when it's inserted but not working, the device doesn't actually show up in device manager, even though, technically, it *is* there.

Secondly, even if you manage to convince windows to show you the device so that you *can* uninstall it, if you do nothing else, it will just reinstall the same dodgy driver the next time you insert the stick.

So what you need to do is, firstly, get windows to show you the device in device manager. Then you need to uninstall it. Then you need to delete the dodgy driver, and identify and hack into a protected registry key in order to force windows to reinstall a completely fresh driver the next time it sees the thumbdrive.

Here's how to do it:

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Step 1: Remove Hidden Devices

1. Open a Command Prompt.
2. Type "set DEVMGR_SHOW_DETAILS=1" (without quotation marks) and press Enter.
3. Type "set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1" (without quotation marks) and Press Enter.
4. Type "start devmgmt.msc" (without quotation marks) and click press Enter.
5. Click View. Click Show hidden devices.
6. Click "+" to expand devices, Unknown devices and USB devices.
7. Are there any devices and unknown devices (including grayed out devices)? If so, right click and Uninstall each of them.

Step 2: Remove all oem*.inf files

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1. Click start and click run then under the run line type in the command "cmd" (without the quotation marks)

2. In the command line, type in the following (without the quotes) and press enter after each command:

"cd \windows\inf"
"ren infcache.1 *.old"
"ren oem*.inf *.old"
"del C:\windows\setupapi.log"
"exit"

Step 3: Removing all entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Enum/USB that start with VID using REGEDIT.

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Removing the VID entries from the registry will cause them to be redetected at restart.

CAUTION: If you have a USB keyboard, mouse, scanners, and other things you know are working, do not remove the VID entry for these devices, otherwise, Windows may not restart correctly.

1. Click Start and click Run. Type regedit and click OK. The Registry Editor window will open.

2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB.

3. Highlight and delete all the VID_.... entries for usb devices that you cannot identify. Remember not to delete the entries mentioned above.

You may not have permssion to delete keys, do the following.
Permissions may be set allowing the deletion of the VID_ entries by following the steps below:

a) Right-click the key to be deleted, and then click Permissions. The VID_... Permissions window will open.
b) With Everyone highlighted in the Group or User name section, select Full Control in the Permissions section.
c) Click Apply, and then click OK.

5. Restart your compuer.

Step 4: Reconnect the USB device that was not previously working. Windows should automatically rerinstall the drivers.