usb 2.0 not working in windows 7?

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!

All my yellow "!" are gone!

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:

http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/139441-standard-enhanced-pci-usb-host-controller-not-running.html