"Theo" wrote:

You should post you exact hardware configuration for this
type of problem.

I have a MSI K8T800Pro Neo2 motherboard with both Vista x86
& x64, RC2, and I have never encountered any USB problems.

Your motherboard uses a VIA chipset. Mine (an Abit KN8 Ultra) uses the
nForce 4 Ultra chipset, and USB is not functioning on either the x86 or the
x64 versions. Now admittedly I have 3gb of memory in my system, and that is
a contributing factor to the problems I have (it'll work without issue when
you have 2gb or less) but the issue in my case is that it should work with
3gb, 4gb or more of onboard memory. With my issues, I'm convinced it was
either a slip-up somewhere or a quality control problem that escaped notice.

It is my opinion these USB problems are hardware related
from the perspective that Vista either has a bug in it
induced by Microsoft, or that Microsoft has not received the
appropriate software from the vendors to include in the
baseline OS.

That brings up an interesting issue. Are the Microsoft USB drivers
universal in nature, or are they chipset specific. Since USB specifications
are written in stone, the theory is that they should work with any vendor's
chipset, unless the implementation of the standards include vendor-specific
code. The reason I ask is does anyone have 3gb in their systems with VIA or
Intel chipsets and aren't having a problem, or if people are having the same
issues, is there an issue with the Microsoft USB drivers themselves?