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usbport.sys
By Wolfie | June 29, 2007
For at least a year now, possibly longer, I’ve been having a problem with my laptop; every now and then (or every five minutes, if it was in that sort of mood) it would simply freeze for no reason that I could divine.
It seemed to do it whatever I was doing as well; it could be sitting there idle, or I would be in the middle of writing a letter, or watching a video clip, or listening to iTunes. There seemed to be no common cause.
So I did what any geek would do - I re-installed Windows. Complete re-format job, recovery disks, the lot. Seemed to work at first, but that could have been because nothing was loaded. Went through loading all the software back on and at some point in the process it started to do it again. But I hadn’t been paying attention and I wasn’t sure what had made it start playing up again.
It got quite bad so I did the whole process again. This time I went more slowly - partly because I really couldn’t be arsed - and for ages it didn’t do it’s whole locking-up, freezing thing. Then I loaded SP2 and it started to do it again. So I took SP2 off - and it stopped doing it.
That’s the solution, then, I thought; leave SP2 off. Something has changed in that update that screws my machine up. And I left it off for quite a while, until such time as I needed to load a new piece of software and it told me that SP2 was required. (Whilst I can’t now remember which piece of software it was, I know that I haven’t taken it off, so also haven’t taken SP2 off again yet).
But of course, as soon as I loaded SP2 again, the locking-up problem started again. Over time, I began to realise that the problem was somehow related to the USB ports, but I had no idea how. Anytime I used the laptop without anything connected to the USB, I had no problems. Plug a device in and sometime in the next few minutes or few hours (never few days) it would freeze again. I tried using a USB 2.0 card in the PC slot, in case it was the exiting hardware; no change. I tried removing all the USB controllers, etc from Device Manager and making the machine find them again; no change. I stopped using USB devices unless absolutely necessary, and that helped - but my ADSL modem is USB so if I wanted to check mail or publish blog posts, I was stuck.
Then last week, I loaded a new piece of software (Last.fm Player) and got one of those blue screens that says there’s been a problem and Windows needs to restart, starting memory dump. Usually, those screens are gone before you can read them properly but this one froze and I was able to read it all. The offending file - according to the last line - was usbport.sys.
Now, given that I thought the problem might be related to the USB ports this was quite a piece of news. When the machine restarted, I searched for the file. I found that I had two copies; one in system32 and the other in an uninstall folder; the SP2 version was the current one and the one in the uninstall folder was the one that it replaced. Remembering my previous belief that SP2 caused the problem in the first place, I thought the best thing to do was to put the old one back.
Since I did that - over a week ago now - my machine has not frozen at all, even though I have been using it quite heavily to test it. I think my problem is finally solved!
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In the time that I’ve been having the problem, I’ve read numerous webpages, forums, blogs, etc with people having similar unexplained lock-ups. If you’re one of them, try doing what I did; the version of usbport.sys that you want is 133kb in size, is dated 29 August 2002 and is in the folder C:\Windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$. You need to copy it into C:\Windows\system32\drivers and, if your problem is the same as mine was, that should sort you out.
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Of course, there is still the issue of when I create desktop shortcuts I get two of them - but if I delete one, the other one disappears when I refresh the screen. If anyone knows what might cause that, let me know.
Categories: Internet, Technology |
Tags: Microsoft
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:: Smudded had this to say:
Interesting problem. As you probably already know, SP2 added integrated support for USB 2.0 ports and devices. When you replaced the new usbport.sys file with the old one, did your system not start telling you that it was running at speeds of USB 1.1 and that it could be faster? Did you ever install third party drivers for your USB ports? When was your laptop manufactured (in regards to when SP2 was released)? As for your desktop icon problem, I don’t really know what would cause that.
8:39 pm :: June 29th, 2007:: Wolfie had this to say:
The laptop is quite old - it shipped even before SP1 was available.
I don’t have any USB 2.0 devices at the moment, (other than the PC card itself) so that’s probably why I’m not getting any “could run faster” messages.
I don’t think I’ve ever loaded any drivers for the USB ports, unless any were made available through Windows Update. (Not true for the PC card, of course, which did come with drivers).
9:26 pm :: June 29th, 2007:: PressPosts / User / pepe_floyd84 / Submitted had this to say:
http://pressposts.com/Life/usbport-sys/
Submited post on PressPosts.com - “usbport.sys”
[Edit by Wolfie: Sadly, Pressposts seems to have gone the way of the dodo]
6:30 pm :: July 2nd, 2007:: oleg had this to say:
I had the same issue with 2 PCs, both Dells. I use a USB switch to share keyboard/mouse between a Dell desktop and my work laptop. The desktop would freeze every time I would switch back to it so I knew it was USB related. It was a complete freeze, no errors or anything. I would have to power off manually. This would also happen when I unplugged and plugged in certain USB devices.
The issue is with Dell System Software (DSS), a collection of MS hotfixes Dell bundles for many of their products. One of the hotfixes is KB 908673 that has a USB update for usbehci.sys and usbport.sys. This is what was causing this. This patch is not widely available, but some mfgs bundle it. What I did is, I replaced the two files with older versions of the files and the problem went away. You can also just uninstall this hotfix if you installed it yourself, but if it came in DSS or in some other bundle you don’t have that option so you have to replace the files manually. When I called Dell when this first started happening, they just offered to replace my motherboard.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908673
8:34 pm :: September 21st, 2007:: Wolfie had this to say:
Mine wasn’t a Dell but a Sharp that was made specifically for PC World here in the UK. In the end, swapping the files over wasn’t a full fix (see this post for more details) as I think there might have been an underlying hardware problem, so I swapped the laptop for a Mac.
8:08 pm :: September 27th, 2007:: The Wolfs Howl » Blog Archive » Usbport.sys - Update had this to say:
[...] on 29 June, I wrote a post detailing my experiences with a constantly locking-up Windows laptop. For no reason, it would [...]
4:02 pm :: December 23rd, 2007:: Milestone | The New Wolfs Howl had this to say:
[...] wolfieb.wordpress.com, the hands-down winner is Usbport.sys, a post I wrote about my attempts to solve a problem with a constantly freezing Windows laptop. It [...]
9:37 pm :: August 15th, 2008