Many devices Disabled?

A friend of mine gave me a his HP notebook which recently developed a
serious problem. It's an HP Pavilion DV6305 that uses an Nvida chipset
and AMD cpu and runs Vista Home Basic. When he first bought it, I set it
up for him with Eset's Nod32 anti-virus.

The problem appears to be that at least 10 devices appear to be unable
to load the associated device driver and in each case (looking in device
manager) the error message appears to be: Windows cannot load the device
driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (code 39)

Googling on this error only turned up dozens of references to people
having this problem with their CD / DVD drive but nothing like what is
going on here.

Of course my first suspicion was a virus, since this seems to be the
case with so many people having problems these days. I scanned with the
installed Nod32 V4.0.x and it didn't find anything. Of course not that
that completely rules out a virus.

Next I tried running a disk test on the boot drive with both
"Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt
recovery of bad sectors" and the system log seems to indicate that the
hard drive is clean with no problems.

The devices that are disabled include both the Ethernet and wireless
controllers, the USB controllers, the HP quick Launch Buttons, the audio
controller, etc. The only way to get files onto the machine is by
burning them onto CD, since the CD / DVD drive is one of the few devices
that appears to be working. I've tried downloading drivers for the
Nvidia chipset and networking controllers, putting them on a cd and
trying to reinstall them but while the installation appears to complete
without errors on reboot the device still doesn't work properly.

Does anyone have any ideas what I could do to fix this problem? If this
is a virus, any ideas on how to remove it since the installed scanner
can't detect it?

Thanks,

- Chris

> What happens when you boot into safe mode (or safe mode with networking) ?

As far as I can tell in safe mode with networking much of the disabled
hardware is still disabled. The nforce networking controller, the
Broadcom wireless controller and the USB ports are all marked with the
yellow circle and exclamation and properties shows the same code 39
error on all of them.

I've tried running the Nod32 anti-virus from safe mode (command line
version only from safe mode) and if there's a virus it still can't
detect it.

- Chris

> It's odd that you can re-install drivers but on re-booting
> they are not found. Have you tried a system restore?

Up until now, I had not considering that if it is some type of virus
infection that may not work. However I did just try and start the
computer, hit F8 and go to "Repair..." and system restore but I was told
that there are no available system restore points.

- Chris

> I don't know if it would help at all but you could see how it behaves
> when you boot using a rescue disk. There are a few tools on mine as
> well as internet support :
> http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5B4FWYEL
> Other than that I'm out of ideas, maybe time to re-install Vista. :-(

Actually after days of working on this I finally found the problem.
Don't ask me why but someone (most likely my friends kid) installed
something called LibUSB-Win32-0.1.12.1 and it's mainly meant for Win2K
and XP and there are notes saying that some people who have installed it
on Vista have experienced their Usb hardware becoming inaccessible. Why
this would cause the networking controllers and audio controller to get
that code 39 error is beyond me but everything appears to be working now.

- Chris