I have a USB fault that's only a minor annoyance, but which might indicate a deeper 
problem.

My motherboard includes an Intell USB Controller chip, supporting USB 1.1 (which 
in 5 years has never given any trouble), and I recently added USB 2.0 support by 
installing a PCI card with an NEC chipset.

All seven of the USB ports (two USB 1.1 ports on the motherboard, and 5 USB 2.0 ports 
on the PCI card) work fine. But occasionally, every two or three days, Windows seems 
to lose the USB 2.0 settings in Device Manager somehow, because it reinstalls all 
the USB 2.0 host controller and root hub entries (seven entries in all) during boot-up.

I've also had very occasional problems when running programs, that have crashed unexpectedly 
with an error message that refers to one of the USB 2.0 driver files, ousbehci.sys 
(an NEC USB Driver for Win9x: the PCI to USB Enhanced Host Controller), with this 
zero E error: "Error  0E  0028".

I unplugged the PCI card, then booted into Safe Mode and deleted all the USB entries 
in Device Manager; then rebooted and Windows thereupon reinstalled the USB controller 
on the motherboard; then shutdown and plugged in the PCI card, and rebooted, and 
Windows reinstalled the USB 2.0 controller on the PCI Card. But it didn't do much 
good, as I am still suffering from the occasional reinstalls of the USB 2.0 controller 
on boot-up, although the zero E error seems to have been cured.

It might be significant that in Safe Mode I'm now typically seeing one "ghost" entry 
for every normal USB entry (that's to say, each USB device seems to have two entries 
instead of one). But, of course, in normal mode the view in Device Manager looks 
quite normal, with only the entries I'd expect to see.

This is obviously the result of the continual reinstalls of the USB 2.0 controller, 
but (as I say) I tried deleting all the USB entries, including these ghost entries, 
from Safe Mode and it didn't cure the problem. Everything was okay until the first 
random reinstall occured during a reboot.

Under what circumstances is Win ME likely to "lose" the hardware settings for the 
USB 2.0 controllers? And are there any solutions, or work-arounds?

I look at the www.usbman.com site, but couldn't find a solution.

Ed

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