Man, I wished I saved some screenshots.
I wasn’t sure when it happened, but I was getting a pop-up whenever I plugged my USB devices in that said, “This Device may be able to perform faster…” and then it said I had no USB 2.0 or Hi-Speed USB connections installed on my system.
It was driving me nuts since I had a combo USB/Firewire PCI-E card installed and my Kindle, iPod, HTC phone, all complained and I was getting slow(er) USB transfer speeds.
I didn’t know what it could be! I took out the card, blew the dust out, resat the card, etc, re-installed drivers, but nothing made a difference.
Then I read a forum post that said it might be related to the recent Service Pack for Windows 7.
In my device manager, I had three yellow exclamation points next to my USB devices. The forum post said to delete them from your device manager, reboot, and then Windows 7 would reinstall the right driver.
Sure enough, it worked!
In looking back through my Google Search History, I see that I saw an interesting thing in my Event Log:
The driver Driverusbehci failed to load for the device PCI
I work with a real sharp Microsoft Engineer and the first place he always looks is the Event Log.
Here’s the forum post that helped me solve this all: