Plug and Play not working after Windows 7 updates

Just as the title says... I have actually had this problem every time I've re-installed the OS and can't seem to figure out how to fix it. When I install Windows 7 x64 and plug in my mouse or printer right away they will discover the drivers and work automagically. After I go through the Windows updates they just don't seem to work anymore. The only thing I've been able to do to get them to work is run this little MS program(http://windows.micro...ith-USB-devices) I found that apparently forces what I have plugged into the USB port and isn't responding to install drivers and work. I just don't know what to do so I don't have to run this program any time I try to plug something into the USB ports.

What's kind of strange is I have an external drive that I plug in and it works before and after the updates without running that program. Anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

Using a HP Pavilion g7 1075dx Notebook PC just fyi.

Edit: Actually I just tested unplugging the mouse and printer after they were working, restarting the system, and trying to plug them back in again. They don't work again. So as it stands I would have to run that little MS Fix It program every time I plug them in to get them to work.

I know this is an old post, but it shows up at the top of google searches for this problem but I wanted to post my solution for others facing this problemn.

I had this problem, and it extended to ALL devices not just USB. The problem turned out to be that I had installed a half-arsed program that incorrectly modified the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath, which normally defaults to "%SystemRoot%\inf".


They tried to add their own directory to the path, but the fools rewrote the key as REG_SZ instead of REG_EXPAND_SZ, which is necessary whenever the string contains an environmental variable.

Every time installation of a new device was attempted, the following error would appear in C:\Windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log

dvi: Enumerating INFs from path list '%SystemRoot%\inf'
inf: The path %SystemRoot%\inf\*.* is missing!


Consequently, NO device would plug an play, including any system devices one might uninstall to try and force a fresh install. Not knowing about the above bug, when I updated several drivers, my system blue screened because several system devices "disappeared", including the system drive.

Once I used the system recovery tool to install a restore point prior to the attempted driver upgrades and then figured out the problem, I deleted the old DevicePath key an made a new one with the correct data type and that fixed everything. (While I was at it, I set the DevicePath back to the default value and uninstalled the offending program.)