I still haven’t been able to fix the problem that I reported yesterday. After blogging about how Vista update KB 938371 disabled the mouse on my PC, I have found other people reporting the same problem. The mouse shows up in the Device Manage as “unknown device”. If I try to install a device driver for it, it fails with the error dialog “Found New Hardware – Unknown Device) and displaying the following text:
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Windows encountered a problem installing the driver software for your device
Windows found driver software for your device but encountered an error while attempting to install it.
HID-compliant device
An error occurred during the installation of the device
The driver installation file for this device is missing a necessary entry. This may because the INF was written for Windows 95 or later. Contact your hardware vendor.
This occurs with any USB port on my machine and with both of my mice. I have a Logitech wireless mouse and a basic Dell USB Optical mouse. I have a mouse with my Wacom tablet that still works. It has it’s own drivers and MS didn’t touch them. I even took the Microsoft Optical mouse off my wife’s Vista machine (which is working fine with 938371) and plugged into my machine. It didn’t work either.
If I do a System Restore and rollback to the point just before 938371 was installed, the mice work. As soon as I install 938371, I lose the mice. This is really frustrating as 938371 is a prerequisite for SP1.
I’ve been posting this tale on a new message boards and blogs. I’m not the only person having the problem, but we have yet to identify what we have in common that is triggering this. My machine is running Vista Home Premium, 32-bit, on an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. The M2N is NVidia NForce based and I have an AMD Athlon X2 processor in it. You can read about other peoples symptoms in this MSDN Forum thread, this <a title="nV News Forums > Software Forums > Microsoft Windows XP and Vista > KB 938371 disables mouse” href=”http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1624577″>thread</a> I started on an NVidia fan site, and a message that I posed in the Windows Vista Blog.
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