USB Wireless adaptor crash!

My son has my old Dell machine in his bedroom and it's connects to the internet through a Belkin Wireless G USB adaptor. This has worked fine until today when I unplugged it to plug in a usb keydrive. I then plugged it back in and assumed everything was fine till I noticed the internet had stopped working and I noticed the computer was not connected to the network.

I looked and found that the driver for the Wireless adaptor had vanished. I tried to reinstall the driver and the computer crashed and XP would no longer boot (blue screen, reset). I started last known good config and that worked so I tried to install the driver again, and same thing.

I have no idea why the Wireless adaptor driver vanished and why it wont reinstall. I am assuming it's causing a conflict with something but why was it working fine till I unplugged it?

 

Hello,
You can use the steps here to find drivers for devices no longer attached to the computer. Then, if you find the driver for your USB adapter, delete it and reinstall.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/504/how-to-uninstall-hidden-devices-drivers-and-services/

 

Thanks, I did this but the driver is no were to be found. I tried the USB Adapter on my Laptop and while the light comes on when I plug it in, windows doesn't even tell me something has been inserted into the USB. I guess this means the adapter is broken...

 

Is the Belkin USB Wireless adapter shown in your Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel?

 

Yes it's there...

When I orginally noticed that the adator wasn't working I tried to reinstall the driver through "add/remove hardware" I had to manually select the belkin driver which is when the machine crashed. When I reset the machine I removed the Belkin program and reinstalled it thinking perhaps it was a faulty driver and now the driver wont even come up in the driver list in "add/remove hardware"...

 

Do you have any yellow exclamation marks under network adapters? Also, try this. Attach your USB adapter and then go into control panel. Double Click the "Add Hardware Wizard". Select "Yes, I already have the hardware connected" then Next. If you do not see the the adapter, scroll down to the bottom and select "Add a new hardware device" then click Next. Now select. "Install the hardware that I manually install from a list". Select "Network Adapters" and click next. You should see something like "Belkin Components" in the left hand list. Is so, click on the one from the right hand list that matches your device and click Next. If not, I am out of ideas. You might want to take this over to the Driver forum for help.