USB 2.0 ports now running 1.1  

I have an Asus CG5270. I have had two external hard drives connected via USB. They have been connected to the same ports for over a year now. Yesterday, they started going off and on a few times on there own. When I took the USB out of the back of the computer and put it back in I got the message pop up "this device could perform faster". it does this with every USB port on my computer and with both external hard drives. Also when i restart windows it wont boot with the hard drives attatched. Here is what I have tried to do to fix it.

I made sure my setting in the BIOS were set that USB 2.0 was enabled and set to Hi-speed.
I went to device manager and made sure it said USB Enhanced. Which it does twice.
I then uninstalled the Everything Under USB in the device manager and restarted and let windows reload the drivers, which it did.
I also made sure the hard drives worked as USB 2.0 on a different computer which they do.
The then did a clean reinstall of Windows 7.
None of these solved this problem. I still get the message "this device could perform faster". I tried to transfer a file and it is really slow, so it is showing up as USB 1.1.

Any idea what could be going on? Thanks

these external hard drives have been connected to same USB ports for over a year and worked fine. Just recently the same devices connecting to the same ports have began to connect with the USB 1.1. I also checked the BIOS already