Why does Vista constantly initiate the "Found New Hardware" wizard?

[Arkitech]

So I bought an Acer machine (got a nice deal on a q6600) with Vista Home Premium earlier in the year and I dropped in a 8800gt. I had virtually no problems for about 6 or 7 months, then lately in the past month or two Vista started going nuts with Found New Hardware messages. Initially I started seeing these messages for my Saitek Eclipse keyboard, since there are no drivers made for the keyboard I tried to cancel the message but it kept coming back. Eventually I just ignored it and tried to live with it, soon after I started getting Found New Hardware messages for my generic optical mouse (which also does not come with/or need drivers). Not long after that I started getting Found New Hardware messages for my USB drives and my mp3 player. All of these devices are either ones I installed drivers for earlier or drivers were not needed, but for some reason Vista constantly throws out the "Found New Hardware" messages.

As of last week Vista no longer recognizes any of my USB drives, keyboard and my mouse works intermittently. In fact the only way I got my USB mouse to work was to start up in safe mode and then reboot back into normal mode. I don't think it's my hardware that's causing the issue as Vista recognizes when a device is first plugged into the USB ports but it just keeps throwing out that infuriating Found New Hardware message.


Has anyone had this problem before? Were you able to fix it?

Apparently this is some oddball Vista issue that either never revealed itself til now or Microsoft never addressed it. I think it has something to do with how Vista deals with USB devices.

 

[Snapster]

Have you looked in your event logs to see what is the result of the found new hardware wizard (ie failure or similar). It's worth noting that even if a device is recognised as being plugged in on first use that the hardware is working 100%. There are various other questions that arise like did you read what updates you accepted in the past few months?

 

[stevf]

have you checked to make sure your usb ports are still ok? Perhaps you have a hardware problem. Did you confirm all the bios settings pertaining to USB didnt get changed?

Edit - Also what about your mobo drivers? perhaps those need updating or rolled back