Having a very inconvenient problem.

My base PC is doing wyrd things on its USB2 ports. USB peripherals normally work fine, but the moment the peripheral is a storage device (flash disk, external hard drive) or contains storage (nokia 9300i and Olympus camera) then I either get a 'USB device not recognized' error or the USB port behaves as if nothing is attached.

Specs (if this helps):
ASRock P4M800 (some VIA chipset aargh)
CelD 330 2.66 @ 2.94 (147FSB)

This crap started about 2 days back.

Thanks in advance.

So it works fine when you have, say, a mouse plugged in, but as soon as you insert anything with storage it doesn't work?

Ja.

Well that sounds like a problem with Windows rather than with any hardware, which I guess is a good thing (ish).

If it's a real problem, try a reinstall (you'll keep all your progs/files/settings).