Device manager woes

hhtang

Hi everybody. I'm kinda new here, so sorry if I do/say anything against convention.
I'm posting because I have recently encountered a strange problem with Device Manager on my laptop (Vista Ultimate 32-bit, Dell M1530). Today I had trouble getting my desktop to ping to my laptop and vice versa, through a ethernet network. The issue remained whether I connected directly between computers, or through a switch. I narrowed it down to the fact that it was the laptop's fault (because the desktop can connect to the intranet/internet through the network server provided by the apartment I live in, while the laptop can't), so I decided that it would be a good idea to reinstall the ethernet network adapter drivers and see whether that'll fix it.
To my surprise, when I opened up Device Manager, I found that I cannot access the settings for the driver. When I double click it ("Marvell Yukon 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller) in Device Manager, it shows up with the following message: "The driver isn't using any resources because it has a problem".
In fact, to my further surprise, double-clicking on any device (USB mouse, graphics driver, sound etc. you name it) brings up either
1) the same message, or
2) nothing at all, or
3) crashes Device Manager!
It seems there is a problem with Device Manager rather than the network adapter itself. I've searched cyberspace for similar problems but there doesn't seem to be any article on it (other problems re: Device Manager involve it being empty - I've got all my devices listed, just that I can't access their settings, or rollback / update drivers etc.). I've tried the following, short of a fresh reinstall, which I am really not so keen on doing unless I really have to:
1) System file repair (without installation DVD). Didn't work.
2) Startup repair (with installation DVD), which was pretty useless seeing that this problem had nothing to do with startup. Didn't work.
3) System restore, to oldest possible date without becoming equivalent to a fresh install. Didn't work.
I am now doing a virus scan. Will keep you posted.
Finally, I don't know whether this is related, but recently someone decided to send me a file from his phone through Bluetooth. Since then a message saying that a driver needs to be installed for a Bluetooth peripheral device keeps popping up every time I turn on Bluetooth. Problem is, even after I've installed fresh drivers the message keeps popping up. Is this somehow related to my previous problem?
BTW, in a strange twist of fate, the pinging between computers started working again, so I could share files between the two now. The device manager and bluetooth issues remain though.
Thanks in advance; looking forward to any helpful responses,
ht

RootbeaR

Code 10 Error - This device cannot start - Error Code 10

Fair bit to read here.

hhtang

The error is not a code 10 error, and I sincerely doubt that every single device on my computer has outdated drivers. Even if they were, I wouldn't be able to update them because device manager itself is stuffed.
Virus scan identified no infections.
Any other suggestions?

sychial

Though I don't know what is going on with your system, I would take another approach to the problem. There is a free utility called Device Remover that is a hundred times better than the conventional Windows Device Manager. It is a great replacement for Device Manager and I use it myself. I don't know if it will help you in your case but it sure would be worth a try, less of a fresh install. I hope that the program will get you a little further than Device Manager does with your troubleshooting.

Also, another idea I would like to mention is this, though it could cost money because you may need another drive and one of those 3.5" 2.5" IDE/SATA to USB adapters: I would image the laptop drive and reinstall the OS to see if that resolves the problem. If not, then I would say that some hardware is going bad in that laptop of yours. But remember you always have the image of the drive to go back to if needed, say hardware went bad and that hardware is then replaced.

I hope this helps some, but I wish I could help you more.

EDITED: Just curious about which virus scanner(s) you used...

sychial

UPDATE: I think I may know what is going on with your machine now. A client brought in a machine, that has been sitting for awhile, a few days ago. The problem that they were having was the machine was acting funny and the sound card stopped working. Device manager was displaying multiple failures among devices with the "The driver isn't using any resources because it has a problem" message and it would also hang and stop responding.

After my diagnosis on the machine I found that the HDD is going bad. Though this machine is an XP Pro machine, it still displayed the same problems that you are having now on your Vista machine. I would go ahead and check the drive for bad sectors to see what results you get.

Other symptoms that occurred was that large downloaded files would not run and caused the Windows Error report box to pop-up after they had crashed and the machine also gave cyclic redundancy check errors. Let us know if this helps...

Strider

@hhtang: Did you find a solution for this problem? It's an interesting case!

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