WinXP not installing drivers correctly...

I think this is more of an OS issue than a driver issue.... anyway, when I plug a USB device in to this Gateway laptop (like a keyboard or mouse or whatever) the New Hardware Wizard opens and asks for the location of the driver. This is more-or-less normal, but if I select "Install driver automatically" it comes back with "Cannot find driver". It does this for generic USB mouses, generic USB keyboards, even generic USB flash drives and USB floppy drives. All these USB devices plug-and-play perfectly on every other PC I've ever tried them on, they never open the New Hardware Wizard, nor do they prompt for a driver location. But in the rare event that they do prompt for a driver location, using the "install automatically" always works, but not on this one Gateway laptop. I haven't spent too much time trying to figure it out just yet and I thought I'd run it by all you fine folks here at Major Geeks first...
:-D :major

Thanks!

 

XP or Vista?

EDIT: Sorry. You wrote that: XP!

 

Well, after checking all the Windows services (UPnP, PnP, etc) to be sure they were running correctly, and after checking/re-registering every DLL file under the sun, and after a malware scan or two, and after re-installing the chipset drivers, and after running sfc /scannow, I performed a safe repair WinXP re-install and that took care of everything.
:-D