I’ve just spent a tedious evening doing computer maintenance, after Apple’s iPod Updater screwed up all the USB drivers on my laptop.
I tried various strategies to fix it but couldn’t figure out how to get USB working again, so in the end I reloaded a good clean image of my drive C: from last October using Norton Ghost and then reinstalled or updated all the software that had changed since then.
Not a fun way to spend an evening, but certainly better than re-installing the OS and all the software from scratch, which is about a week’s worth of work instead of a few hours!