Son of a B_#%$ this ones kicking my butt

YeOldeStonecat

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Thought it would simple, friend of my wife, sorta older HP...I worked on it before cuz she had some light malware, tuned it up. Called with problems about computer shutting down a few times a day, illegal operation...would like to report to microsoft, etc.

Sounded like a piece of cake...I planned at being at my office all day doing other stuff.
Put up on my bench...plug in kb, mouse, video...fire up...gets to the WinXP Home profile screen where you can click her name or her hubbies name..and that's it. My mouse or keyboard don't appear to load.

Power cycle...I note that hitting the power button makes the computer gently "power down". So it was not hard locked.

Try again...no luck. Notice that mouse lights up during POST and first part of BIOS...but light goes out when Windows starts booting up.
Keyboard remains lit up during entire time...but no response when at Windows login.

Keyboard functions enough to get into BIOS and navigate the BIOS menu.

Notice when browsing the drive, had C:\Found.001 dated 05 of this year...so figured HDD failing. Cloned to new HDD. Still same symptom.

Scanned HDD....no malware found yet.

Boot from another OS CD...and keyboard and mouse work perfectly. So it's not a hardware issue.
Regardless, tried many other mice...work great outside of that Windows install, but not in it.

Recalled she had Kaspersky before switching to McCrapee a month ago, remember thread here about Kas knocking out upperfilter registry entries...so I opened up the users registry and all those looked fine.
(the whole downgrade from Kaz to McCrapee is a whole 'nother joke)

Copied in fresh hccoin.dll and usbhub.cyc and usbehci.sys and usbport.sys from known good working healthy XP rig to Windows\system32 and windows\drives. Still no love.

So much for a quick favor....

running out of ideas.....
manual registry restore I suppose is next....
Looking in the RUN section...was filled..but with the usual harmless stuff.
 
What happens in safe mode with command prompt? Or recovery mode? Could just be her profile.

I had that in my mind to type.....something distracted me (like 80 phone calls)....
Safe mode...I can get up to it, she detects F8..but shortly after...when Windows keeps loading, yeah...no KB, no mouse.
Safe mode w/command...nada

Wasting my time with a checkdisk right now....just for giggles.
No PS2 ports on it...some Dell Inspiron 530 (Pentium D)
Tried all different USB ports.
 
SFC /scannow ?

Sometimes a ram problem will affect a machine but only when running an O/S with more complex stuff loaded. Ram test ? Swap ram ?

EDIT: Skip the ram, I thought it was hanging on safe mode.
 
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Is there no option for ps2 mouse and keyboard? I actually bought a pci ps2 card for these sorts of jobs as we used to get a lot of Dell PCs in with USB HID detection problems in XP.
Sometimes it's a problem with the HID service not starting or USB.sys missing or corrupt.
 
Serial port? Happen to have an old school serial mouse in a box under a table somewhere?

Access the hard drive offline, manually add a remote access util in there.

You're a better man than I. On something that old, and for a favor to boot, I'd have abandoned it already and either backed up and reinstalled or headed to the pub.
 
First thing I would have done is boot with a live CD and roll back registry

Did that after the checkdisk...went back a couple of weeks...no luck.

Would probably work to push that back to before she installed kaspersky...but dunno when she dumped that for mcgufee. So rolling back to far, Kas registry entries but McCrapee program files...would get ugly.
 
Recalled she had Kaspersky before switching to McCrapee a month ago, remember thread here about Kas knocking out upperfilter registry entries...so I opened up the users registry and all those looked fine...

How did you do this?

Sure sounds like a filter issue....

Are you sure there was only a single "UpperFilters" entry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E96B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} with a Value data of "kbdclass"?

Same for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96F-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}, a single UpperFilters entry with a Value data of "mouclass"?
 
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I wouldn't be surprised if you could get your hands on a PS2 keyboard it would work like a champ. It's funny because motherboard manufacturers were heading towards getting rid of the PS2 port completely and then things like this started to happen. Now I notice the PS2 port is back and even Dell computers the Optiplexs come with two PS2 ports lol.
 
How did you do this?

Sure sounds like a filter issue....

Are you sure there was only a single "UpperFilters" entry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E96B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} with a Value data of "kbdclass"?

Same for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96F-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}, a single UpperFilters entry with a Value data of "mouclass"?

Offline registry editor via a live CD.....confirmed there was only 1 upperfilters entry for 96B and 96F...correct entry.
 
Have you tried a repair install?

Will probably try that today. I'm on the road for most of today but heading in early this morning to piddle with it.

I have a feelling also if we have her drop off her own KB 'n mouse...those will work....I've seen this behavior once before on a bunch of cloned IBM ThinkCentres that were mass purchased from the refurb store of Newegg....no additional keyboards or mice would work, but one original type did.
 
Are you leaving the machine on for long enough to detect and install the USB keyboard & mouse?
I've had some XP machines where I've had to just leave it sitting at the login screen for about 15 mins before they came to life.

Nothing else connected to the USB ports?

They are wired USB devices and not wireless?
 
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