I would try to boot up to an Ubuntu live cd then from there see if you can get to the inter-net and just see if you have any problems.

Dang... sorry to hear that, Teric :(

Hope the problems will get solved soon.

Did you make sure that you commanded the USB to let you remove your hardware safely from the USB port? If you don't do that there is usually a good chance your computer will freeze up like that. As with not being able to recognize your equipment sounds like to me some sort of failure in the ports but you said that the equipment can be sensed so the USBs still work. Best option I could give you here is that you can located the drivers online through your wife's machine, then transfer them over to a working jump drive and transferring it over to your computer and install it there

the add/remove devices is really only necessary for mass storage devices - besides those, USB is entirely hotpluggable (or is designed to be, at any rate)

Did you try a check disk?

Start>Run>type CMD in the box and Click OK.
You will get a DOS window, type chkdsk C: /f at the end of the line and press enter.
It should respond that it cannot lock the drive and do you want to run the check disk when you next restart. Type Y and enter. Then type 'exit', enter to leave the DOS window. Now restart the machine.

Your computer should reboot and as Windows is restarting it will do a hard drive C: check, fixing what it finds.
The /f is what tells it to fix, if you do not enter that it will just check and report back at the DOS screen what it found.

I have had to do this a number of times, especially after Windows has done an update.

DOH--haven't tried that yet. *smack self* Thanks for the heads-up, Mike.

Strange, I had something where my wireless adapter stopped working, but luckily the problem was solved by buying a USB network adapter. ;)

Oh, damn. Sorry, I dunno.

I once had a problem where unplugging a Bamboo device made my computer completely cut off, then it randomly stopped doing that. Maybe the problem lies in the tablet itself?

does the machine still list your network devices in the device manager? If it does then you might just have a driver issue.

I would try irontiger's suggestion, if you can use the devices in ubuntu then it's a windows issue, otherwise you might have a hardware issue :/

Yes, it does list the devices in the manager, and it says they are "Working Properly", but when I try to enable the wireless connection, it simply fails with the cryptic message: "Failed to enable connection."

wow thats pretty crazy, I've only had two similar problems. when I built my computer I set up the front usbs with special connector but anything usb that was plugged in gave itr a blue screen and restarted, one time a usb connecter broke off inside the port and shutdown instantly when I used pliers to remove it. that computer never started up again though

OUCH! Sounds like that's worse than what happened to me. :(

I am likewise with IronTiger on this one, get ya a live-CD, (Which all good live-cds are linux, it dont have to be an Ubuntu one, Knoppix is nice for this too) and boot-to-CD, and see if you have web... I really think this to be a windows problem... Just un-plugging something from the USB is honestly designed not to cause disruption to -anything- else in the system... This is sounding like windows had a major fail when it unloaded the drivers for the tablet (like it does every time you unplug it, only to load them when you plug it back in)... Like, it froze half way through unloading those drivers from the kernel, and that scrambled its little driver-brain, and now it cant figure out how to load drivers it already has (the tablet driver, and network drivers)...

I would go with Mike's suggestion too, forcing a scandisk on reboot. Cause if there was file-corruption in that crash, it would correct it to the best of its ability... Scandisk isnt just a good idea after a BSOD, its a good idea -any- time the system does something like this, unexpected and bad... It really is amazing how lazy the windows kernel is with its filesystem management... The filesystem has no journal, and its disk-commits are just... well... lazy... So when it 'crashes' its likely that there was some file corruption, quite likely... Scan disk cant resurrect data that was never written (committed) to the HDD, but it can fix bad file structures due to corruption, so yes, a very good idea... 'Start>Run' type in 'CMD' then 'chkdsk C: /f' and yes to the q about scan at reboot... It will serve you well =^.^=

Okay, I'll certainly try that when I get home after work this evening. Thanks Leo!

Any update on the issue?

Did a backup of important files last night, and then a complete re-install of WinXP.

USB controller doesn't respond, wireless network card doesn't respond. I'm afraid I'm going to need to take it to a professional to get it diagnosed/repaired.

Ouch. =>.<=

Any idea if others have had this issue before you?

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2670884