Windows XP: USB mouse and keyboard stopped working

I have been reading this thread and see a lot of posts about "rolling back" to prior system restore versions, etc.  I really don't believe that is it.  I have a number of PCs that I can never let "sleep" as I won't have a mouse/keyboard when they wake up.  These PCs exhibited this behavior from day 1 of their new O/S installations.  My keyboard is MS and my mouse is Logitech, both wired).

As was mentioned numerous times in this thread, folks generally had keyboard control, etc, prior to windows loading (ie, POST screens, etc).  That suggests the devices are functionally communicating at the BIOS level.  It has to be something with windows (although no bets on that).

I had a serendipitous situation yesterday, as I was building a new PC.  I wanted a specific external USB device "disconnected" at boot up, so that windows would not see it as I did some partition work.  But, I had just freshly built the PC and walked away.  The default "sleep" mode went into affect, after I walked away, so I hit the keyboard to wake it up, which worked fine (another point that tells me it is not the BIOS, etc).

After hitting a key on my PC, as noted, the PC woke up, but alas, no mouse and keyboard.  I had also forgotten to unplug the USB harddrive.  So, I happened to pull the power from the USB hard drive just to shut it down, and VOILA, my mouse/keyboard returned to full functionality.

I experimented with this numerous times and found it always works to bring back my keyboard/mouse, after a sleep event.

I post it here, as one other option for the folks struggling with this.  Should you have external USB drives (Hard drives, CD/DVD drives, etc), and your keyboard/mouse is not working, try, just for grins, to start unplugging USB devices like these, and see if you keyboard / mouse begins to function again.

I think there is some sort of bug in the device drivers that interface with windows at wakeup, or somesuch. No other wild guesses other than that, however this problem seems to be pretty wide spread.

In full disclosure: I do have a KVM switch between my keyboard/Mouse, and my various PCs, however I have same problem if I directly connect the devices.  I have also noted that quite frequently, with external USB hard drives (even tho they are lower in boot priority in bios), that I will see what I call a LONG BOOT sequence, where windows screen kinda just goes dark for a very long time (minutes), then, eventually proceeds, like it hit some sort of timeout; as if it was searching for another boot drive on the USB).  If I remove the USB drives at boot, then 100% of the time I never see this issue, and it is repeatable on a number of my systems.

Cheers...and happy computing

P

I had the same problem but I was dual booting Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 on separate hard drives. I  updated my Intel  chipset drivers and now my mouse and keyboard are working fine.

My mouse and keyboard worked fine in windows 7 btw.

I had this same problem on a Dell Latitude E5530. I setup the drive with a dual boot XP x86, and Win7 x64. Everything worked flawless on Windows 7, but in XP x86 SP3 the onboard touchpad and mouse worked fine, but external mouse and keyboard did not. Wasn't being recognized in XP.

Dell has latest chipset from Intel at 9.3.0.1019.

The ones from Intel at 9.3.0.1026 resolved this issue.

Thanks for the help Heddly!

Sorry, I know that this thread is an old one, but yesterday I've run on the same problem on Dell Optiplex GX620.

There's no PS/2 ports, only USB, and there was no mouse nor keyboard working, winxp stuck on Device Driver Wizard looking for USB Composite Driver. (weird situation since driver is present in system32 and inf folder) and I couldn't find any solution that solved my problem, so maybe someone will use this solution later.

The story was the same, USB Keyboard works in BIOS, and early starting stage of windows, but not after login screen.

The solution is quite simple. When You see USB Composite Wizard asking to search for USB driver, all You need is hit NEXT, but there's no possibility since there is no keyboard or mouse or even rdp possibility. All You have to do is to insert Windows XP (corresponding to your sp version) install disk to your CD drive. Windows will automatically search for drivers and install USB Composite. But from now on you are stuck at another window with finish button and no keyboard and mouse sill aint working, because it installs first USB Composite,and than USB HID. You have to restart your system and after hitting F8, choose safe mode with command prompt. This finished the installation of a USB Composite, and adds the rest of drivers from the install CD. Another point is that I had to do it twice, 2 normal windows boots, and 3rd into safe mode with command prompt, and i could use keyboard to choose admin or user account in safe mode.

Oh, and at first use only keyboard...