After a repair install of XP, I found that the system wouldn’t auto detect any usb devices.

Also the video display was set to “default vga driver” but most display properties tabs and buttons were greyed out (so I couldn’t update to the correct video driver).

Device manager shows no problem devices, so I figure it should be OK.

A search of the net shows that the default vga driver should not be removed (or you will need to use the xp recovery console to get it back… very messy).

I decide to take a closer look at the usb problem instead, and I find some mention of removing the existing usb drivers.

So I try it, and after a reboot, the drivers are auto-detected, and then all the usb ports work perfectly.

Right, now back to the video problem.

After a lot of searching, I find someone who fixed this problem by downloading and installing a VIA 4in1 driver (sorry, I lost the link).

So I look at device manager, under system devices, and I decide to focus on:

• VIA cpu to agp2.0/agp3.0 controller
• VIA standard host bridge
• VIA standard PCI to ISA bridge

So I R-click on each one, click on “update driver” (I make sure my universal driver CD is in the CD drive), and the drivers are updated to more recent ones.

As soon as that happens, windows suddenly wants to update the video driver (to an SIS driver). I let it update automatically, and a reboot later, I can finally change the display to a higher resolution, and to more than 16 colours.

In case there are further problems, I decide to try updating other drivers in device manager, but all the other devices seem to be up to date.