Original Post
At some point in time, I'm not sure when or why, something happened so that now everytime I tried to plug something into a usb port that should be plug and play e.g. an external hard disk, digital camera, usb stick, new ipod etc... a little icon pops up in the bottom right saying "new hardware found, a problem occurred during hardware installation..". Everything that used the usb ports before I started getting this problem still works, like my old ipod. However anything else gives me that problem, even my brand new ipod which I plugged into the same dock connected to the same usb port gives that error. I have a feeling something along the way corrupted the way windows XP automatically registers new USB devices. I'm really desperate to get this fixed as hours of searching on the internet has proved fruitless.