Posted 07/13/09 at 11:30:49 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

I’m having a blue-screen problem on a T42p ThinkPad with 2GB of RAM running Windows XP Pro SP2. This is a corporate laptop issued to me as a mobile employee, so I have admin rights to it.

Every time I plug a USB device into either of the laptop’s two USB ports, it blue-screens. As long as the device is plugged in, the laptop loops through a boot process to a blue screen. Once I unplug the USB device, it behaves. Exceptions: If I put a USB power cable into the ports in the laptop for power only, there is no problem. I have a PCMCIA USB adapter too, and anything I plug into these USB ports works fine.

This PCMCIA USB adapter has a USB power cable, which I plug into the USB port in the laptop without incident. I have the PCMCIA USB adapter plugged into the PCMCIA slot, with a seven-port USB hub plugged into it running a printer, a wireless mouse, a keyboard, and a hard drive. I have a second hard drive’s data cable plugged into the USB hub, while its power cord is plugged into the laptop’s USB port, with no problem.

When I called the corporate help desk, they assumed I had a bad motherboard and sent me a replacement laptop. Same problem but worse. The new laptop, which was a 1GB machine, did not recover when the USB port was unplugged. I had to do disc recovery involving file and index cleanup to get it to behave. I went through this several times.

I used the same boot drive, which I had to transfer back and forth, on both laptops.

Fortunately, when I returned the hard drive to the old laptop, it worked the same as it had originally. I have returned the “new” replacement laptop since it did me no good, keeping the original laptop.

I’m to the point of reinstalling the OS, but I don’t have access to the corporate image without driving 90 miles, and at this point, I’m leery of just installing a different OS copy, with a different serial number.

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