USB printers fail after installing USB PCI c

[shilo]

New USB PCI card installed and works fine with all hardware (thumb drive, scanner, camera, portable drive) but it will not work with any of 3 printers. When I install a printer it may work, but only until re-booting. After that, windows "finds new hardware" and installs a 2nd copy of the printer, but then none of them will connect. I get a "Device not connected" message in the properties/port.

The irq is being shared with my onboard sound card and a PCI modem. I know this can cause problems but with the other hardware working fine I havent' attempted to change these settings. I did remove my Com 1 and Com 2 and LPT ports from the BIOS while troublshooting this, but windows assigned a couple of the USB controllers to those irq's.

As of now, each time I reboot Windows finds new hardware (the printers) that have already been installed, installs them again, and in the printer properties, the USB port for each printer says Device not Connected, even tho one of them is.

Before I was using on-board USB 1.1 which I disabled in the BIOS. I did this after the problem was apparent.

Current setup:
Win98SE
Athlon XP with K7S5A
American Megatrends BIOS 2001

Any suggestions??

Thanks,
John

[ale52]

What happens if you enable the 1.1 USB in the BIOS & plug one of your printers in there?

Alan <><  

[shilo]

What happens if you enable the 1.1 USB in the BIOS & plug one of your printers in there?

Alan <><  

Thanks for the reply Alan -  but problem is solved.

Along your thought lines, I had been connecting via a hub. I uninstalled all USB drivers, software and components, then reinstalled the Card, and installed the mian printer,connected directly to the pci card. Seemed to work OK. Then 2 more printers, and still OK. Then all the other USB hardware, no problem.  Turns out the hub, which is made by Targus, is made for laptops, and thus has a "Y" cable with two Type A connectors - one is for data + power (normal) and the other is just power. Having had them both connected to my onboard usb for several years I had forgotten all about how they worked. Well for some reason the pci card didn't cooperate like the old onboard USB when both were connected.

I just don't know why it only affected the printers and not the other hardware. Probably had to do with messing up the printer port addresses.

If anybody has problems with USB I suggest checking out www.usbman.com (and posting the question here of course)

They have a ton of helpful info and links (for those not running XP) and got me going in the right direction. Especiallly interesting was learning how to clean up Device Manager in Safe Mode. Amazing all the old junk and duplicate stuff I found installed!

Thanks again,
John