USB devices malfunction error

Have you gone to your control panel > systems > hardware device manager and checked your drivers and its troubleshooter? I have been this route with a different issue using XP Pro and Dell Pocket PCs. My company uses wireless and we use Dell antennae that plug into a USB port. I have had them drop completely off the network, go out to the PC, take the connection out of the port and hot swap the connection to another port, and all is well again. I've checked power settings, network adapters, drivers, etc. and can't find anything that looks wrong. So my next question would be have you tried switching USB ports? I know it sounds oversimplified, but I have had this problem for a couple of months, the last problem occuring two days ago.

I have successfully deleted then reinstalled the usb ports from device manager. For some reason they were not configured correctly, although showed no problem in device manager. Once delete and a scan for hardware changes was done, the ports reinstalled and worked ok.

Check the computer setup when the machine starts up (F1). Dell has a USB emulation mode enabled, and this causes problems. Disable the emulation mode and that should take care of the problem.

see in device manager try to uninstall and reinstall or disable and re-enable the device this should solve the problem
BEST OF LUCK