USB drivers fail to load

My USB ports have recently failed to operate. There is the yellow! in Device Manager. The error message says, “NTKERN.VXD device loader for this device could not load the device driver.”
I’ve tried: updating the drivers; putting the USB ports ontheir own IRQ; doing a registry check. I’ve also tried restoring an old registry copy, but the current Win won’t start with the older registry. My sense is that there is some file that is preventing proper load because the file is either wrong or corrupted.
OS is Win98se
Computer is Abit KT7A Raid
I don’t believe its a hardware issue because Win recognizes the ports when I delete them in Device Manager and then restart Windows.
I’m trying to avoid a complete reformat and reinstall.