After installing SP1 on Acer Aspire 7000 Notebook with Vista Home Premium I noticed ongoing USB problems. No new devices can be connected or drivers installed any more. First problem appeared when I wanted to connect a Canon XH A1 Videocamcorder via Firewire. The IEEE 1394 Bus was okay but the application to capture the videos could not see the camera even it was appearing at the device manager by name but with exclamation mark. As this could be also a compatibility problem with the video signal I wanted to save the videos on a SHDC Sandisk Flash Card. But the card reader slot aboard of the notebook could not read the card. So I tried to connect via USB adapter which could not be installed because of USB driver installation problems for the needed SM-Bus Controller as well as the following PCI-Cardbus Bridge. Both installations ended up in endless loops looking for drivers at windows update and then locally in the Windows\system32\Driverstore folder. Each time the last message was that the system was able to find driver software but while installing showed up a problem. The system could not find the needed file. I looked around almost everywhere on the net including the Acer driver download site but no way to get some useful software. By then I started uninstalling all suspicious devices at the device manager including the hidden and old ones, deleted the INFCACHE.1 file at the Windows\inf folder to avoid old data and checked for the Device Path at the registry if it was correctly set to the inf folder. But still no way to leave this boaring installation loop. It always showed up again each time I booted my system. Even worse I detected that since quite a while an external HDD which was working properly before was entering the same mess recommanding driver installation and could not be accessed any more. I really would be appreciate every single tip what I could do now to get back to 'normal' USB environment. Thanks to everyone who could help me with that.

windows vista SP1 is buggy, recommended system restore before SP1 update and wait for SP1 to get a few more updates and bug fixes, or wait for SP2 to come out...