Really getting annoyed with Windows XP. The problem I mentioned in the post on April 10 keeps coming back.
It keeps reporting it has found new hardware and adding lots of IEE1394 Texas Instruments devices, and I mean lots, over 50 of them before I cleaned it up this time.
Apart from really slowing down the machine they conflict with my real USB devices, eventually interrupt conflicts cause my USB devices to stop working, so I have to fix everything up again.
Spinach Anti-Spyware, AVG Free, System Mechanic, AdAware and Spybot all say the system is completely clean of anything nasty, so I don’t know what is causing this. Nothing usefull on google about the problem either.
Even if I reboot the PC with all the USB devices unplugged from the PC it still finds new hardware and adds another IEE1394 device entry !, so it’s not a malfunctioning USB device causing this.
Anyway, I finally found an easy way to fix it.
Boot into safemode, where it only finds the devices I actually do have. Save the safemode hardware profile over the top of the default profile, and boot again. When the default profile is correct the PC will run for 2-3 weeks before deciding it has found new hardware again.
Actually, I have now created a couple of hardware profile entries and ‘select’ which one to boot from. That may help me track down what is causing the issue at some point.
And while it is probably unrelated the problem happened after the windows genuine advantage update and the latest AVG version update, pretty sure I didn’t install any other software around that time. Anyway I have configured Spnach and WinPatrol to prevent WGA running to see if that stops the problem comming back.
This is a dual boot server, apart from WinXP-Pro it also boots Fedora Core 10. The FC10 image has never had any problems with the USB devices or course :-) :-) :-); thank god thats where I spend most of my time (unless playing games).
Anyway, the current state is after booting of a copy of the safemode profile I haven’t had any issues for 3 days so far… so now to spend the next 3-4hrs doing another full backup and then copying it off to my network backup server (I’m using Acronis personal which doesn’t allow backups to network disks, anybody know of a free backup solution that can write bootable recover ISO files onto a network drive ???).
