Driver for USBs - front USBs not working

Greetings.

This is a switch from the Hardware forum at:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=178464

Got some things sorted out there, but now left with one or two questions.

Situation is that front USBs (two of) ceased working on 2nd hand computer when the Motherboard was replaced. They used to work. Now the computer hangs if a 2.0 thumb drive is plugged in (I haven't got any slower USB devices to test, that I know of). Front USB card is marked as USB1. Rear USBs (built in (2) and added port connected through pins (2)) all USB2.0 and working.

Discovered that I could get the front USBs to work if I disabled teh Enhanced USB Controller. However, I then get messages saying that my devices would work faster if I used USB2.0.

That led me to wonder if I maybe had the wrong USB drivers (since the USBs used to work on teh previous MB and drivers), or if there might be better ones, or if I could add additional drivers to control the front USB port, or ...

This seems to be a problem for a lot of people - there are lots of questions about this in various forums I have visited, so it might be worth sorting out, if possible.

Question - can I do anything about the drivers to fix teh front ports?

Tried so far looking up MB manufacturer and getting drivers from there. The motherboard (Sapphire Axion with ATI radeon 9100 IGP chipset) drivers seem to be non-existent. dlb (Major Geek) went looking (in Hardware forum), but came up empty-handed. He did direct me to another motherboard that was similar (at http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/M...ProductID=1750 - I installed the chipset driver from that site to solve a SMBus Controller problem), but this site doesn't have USB drivers, or if it does, I can't find them.

I tried Driverguide.com as another option - I already had it installed - I had had it for a while. When I tried it, I was told it had expired and I should download a new, free copy. I did that and ran it, and I got the same msg. So I uninstalled teh original and re-installed the new one, and still received teh same msg. Then I went searching for a solution to this issue. No luck. I thought I might need a key (one of teh options was to enter a key), and I found through FAQs that I could get one from teh key page. Went looking for the key page. No luck. Gave up in frustration on that option.

The drivers I have at the moment for the Enhanced Controller are listed as :
usbehci.sys
usbhub.sys
usbport.sys
hccoin.dll
usbui.dll
File version is: 5.1.2600.2180(xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Driver version: 5.1.2600.0
Driver date: 1/6/2002

I tried updating the driver through Control Panel, but it said that it couldn't find a better match.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I should say that plodr (Major Geek) advised me as follows (in teh Hardware forum):

Apparently the new mobo doesn't support very old technology. USB 1 was around when windows 95 was out. I had a computer with USB ports on the back and I had to download drivers to get them working under windows 95.
Get yourself a new card for the front ports.

However, that was before I managed to get the front ports working, and I am now wondering if teh same advice still applies. If so, I'll drop the subject, but I thought it might be worth persevering a little more, especially since it seems to be a widespread problem.

PS. Running Win XP SP2.

PPS. If it helps, a complete Everest report of my computer is attached to my 6 January post at:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=178624

 

BTW, Disabling the enhanced controller doesn't seem to have any observable effect on performance. Is that possible? It may be that I just don't do anything that stretches the system.