Jo-Anne wrote:
My four-year-old Dell Precision M4300 laptop running WinXP has only three
USB ports. I use the one in back for the printer, which leaves two on the
right side--one above the other.

My Contour three-button mouse works fine in the top port but has never been
recognized in the bottom one. Other devices--external hard drives and flash
drives--work normally in the bottom one. I'd prefer to have the mouse
plugged into the bottom port because it's difficult to plug in the other
devices under the mouse connection.

Any suggestions for troubleshooting and fixing the problem?

Thank you!

Jo-Anne

If you go Start : Run : devmgmt.msc and then select View : Show Hidden Devices,
does it show up in there ?

With the mouse plugged into the working port, set up that view, then try
moving the mouse, and see if something shows up in Non Plug and Play Drivers
(hidden devices). If so, you could try deleting the item from the Hidden
Devices. The entry might mention "mouse" or "HID" or the like. HID
stands for Human Interface Device.

If you had a copy of UVCView or USBView, you could watch what happens
when the device is plugged into the non-working port, but because
you've verified the port with a USB hard drive, I don't see a lot
of value in such a move right now. This is probably something
recorded in the registry, which is not right, rather than something
being physically wrong with the mouse.

You could check the very end of the setupapi.log file, for new
entries recording what happened when you plugged the mouse in.
The entries in the file should be date-stamped, so you can
see what your attempt today did.

The Microsoft utility "devcon" can be used to work on this. But it
has roughly the same functions, as working on Device Manager directly.
If you run out of things to try, you can work with that from the
command line. Part of the fun of using this, is learning how to
use it (like, how do you figure out the "instance name"). But if the
GUI way doesn't work, this is another way to get the job done. Note
that there is no 64 bit version (x86-64) on this page, and the
one usable version is 32 bit. The IA64 is for Itanium servers.
To get a 64 bit version (like, to run on Windows 7 64 bit),
you have to do a 700MB download and pull the file off the
resultant download. Let's hope it doesn't come to that...
You likely just need the 32 bit version.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;Q311272

devcon driverfiles usb*
devcon find usb*
devcon remove the_specific_instance_name

Maybe you can get some instance names from the "find" option. The
problem I had, was when testing a specific instance (my mouse),
some of the characters in the instance name, need to be "escaped",
and I couldn't get the command to accept just one instance.
When I did something like this...

devcon status the_specific_instance_name

the the_specific_instance_name part was getting mis-interpreted
because it had "&" characters in the name. The name of my mouse is:

USB\VID_046D&PID_C01A\5&39258CB2&0&2 : USB Human Interface Device

If you look here, as a reference, you can see 046D C01A is a Logitech mouse.

http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids

046d Logitech, Inc.
c01a M-BQ85 Optical Wheel Mouse

HTH,
Paul