[LMB] AKICOTL: Technical question OT:

[Katrina Knight]

At 03:19 AM 1/24/2008 James M. BRYANT G4CLF wrote:
>Apropos of this my "Safely Remove Hardware" icon has gone from 
>the toolbar notification area ("system tray") and the Device 
>Manager window is totally empty (Windows XP Pro).

Did you notice anything else going wrong at the time you started 
having these problems? The usual reason for the device manager 
being empty is that plug and play is not running. There are 
several possible reasons for plug and play getting turned off. 
Malware is one possibility. Registry corruption from some other 
problem is another as is a user mistake in fooling with what 
runs at startup. All of those things can cause damage beyond 
just that one setting. Malware has been involved with most 
computers I've worked on with this problem. Tracking down all of 
the damage from whatever happened can be time-consuming. If this 
happened relatively recently, you might want to try using System 
Restore to go back to a time before this problem. System Restore 
isn't perfect, but it will generally fix problems of this type 
if you can go back far enough.

>Microsoft advises checking that Plug and Play is set to 
>automatic and others have told me to ensure that I have all 
>permissions in this area allowed. This has been done and the 
>problem persists.

When you checked to make sure plug and play was automatic, was 
it already set that way or did you have to change it? If you had 
to change it, did you check to make sure it stayed changed? Did 
you check to see if it is actually starting? Being set to 
automatic means it should start if needed, not that it 
necessarily does start and stay running.

-- 
Katrina Knight
kknight at fastmail.fm