Keyboard/Mouse not responding
Got a machine here with some issues, and I know nothing about WinXP yet. I'd really appreciate a hand if anybody has any intuitions...
Problem:
When you boot it to the desktop, the keyboard and mouse stop working. The customer has no idea why this started happening; they claim to have done nothing special to the computer, no new hardware or software.
Points:
-Athlon 1400, 256 MB, 30 GB HD, WinXP Pro upgraded from Win98SE (FAT32 file system).
-Kbd and mouse work fine in BIOS, DOS from floppy, Troubleshooter, and the bootup menu. They stop working in the WinXP equivalent to the scandisk screen.
-The computer is not frozen; it still responds to new CDs in the drive; USB equipment being unplugged or plugged in, etc.
-Reverting to Last Known Good configuration does no good.
-messing with BIOS USB and PS2 settings, and replacing kbd and mouse with PS2 and/or serial versions, does not solve the problem.
-attempting to boot to Safe Mode results in a hung computer with a screen full of lines like the following:
"multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS\SYSTE M32\DRIVERS\PCI.SYS" and the kbd/mouse are disabled (no Ctrl-Alt-Del)
-attempting to boot to Debugging Mode results in a hung computer with a black screen and kbd/mouse disabled.
-Scandisk from a boot disk found several damaged files and fixed them, and indicated that the size of the hard disk and some of the files was being misreported, and fixed that too.
I am currently running a Disk Surface Scan on the machine from a boot disk, but it looks like it will take 3+ hours.
Does anybody have any suggestions? Is this just screwy system files, do you think, and how do I fix it when I can't do a damn thing within Windows?