Files to add back to MS
 

A friend of mine in trying to keep his laptop stream lined removed "unneccessary" items as per some of the websites.

His serial port is no longer working and he needs USB functionality to use a mouse. What files will he need to locate and add back in order to make USB work again?

WinXP home

That's awfully complicated, if he didn't mess it up too badly he'll have two options.

First he can attempt to remove/readd the hardware through the Device Manager (gets a little touchy and not really guaranteed to work depending on what he erased).

Second, and more likely to work, would be to use a system restore point prior to the date he removed the files, this should restore the registry pointers to the hardware and then if the files are called on the driver cache should restore them as necessary, might take you a couple reboots though.

If you can't get either of those to work the other options take quite a bit more doing.

Good luck!

just plug it in, its xp it should just work.

Yeah, it should work so long as it has the right information to make it work.

I'm not sure if this would fix driver files, but you could try "sfc /scannow" command on cmd. It "Scans all protected system files and replaces incorrect versions with correct Microsoft versions".