How does XP look for drivers?

I have a XP Home SP2 machine that appears to have amnesia ... it doens't know where to find new drivers ... case in point ... we plugged in a new USB flash drive ... normally XP will go through a few steps saying it found a new device followed by found new usb disk followed by assigning a drive letter. From there on the device just works as a drive. This machine says it can't find the drivers and asks to go looking on the internet or asks to insert a disk ... thinking that the issue may be with the USB services/drivers I deleted all the USB hub and controllers ... XP could not find the drivers for these either ... I had to manually point out to the hardware wizzard for each of 4 controllers and 3 hubs as c:\i386 just to get the USB back up and running.

My hunch is XP is either missing a Path or a pointer of where the installation drivers are ... does anyone possibly know what registry and or other setting is missing for this to occur?

 

....with its eyes closed
Seems to be the case about 90% of the time for me.
I dont believe anything is missing
Thats just the way it is....

 

C:\windows\inf is where all driver infs are stored, unless you downloaded them. There is no standard place for downloaded drivers. Then, its recorded in the registry where the drivers were installed from, and if those files ever get moved....it cannot find them again.

In your case, it sounds like something messed with your Inf directory, or registry. Do you use registry cleaners or clean up applications?

That'd be my first suspect.