Dieing USB?

Here's the problem I am running into. I am working on the computer then, all of a sudden, the mouse will stop responding, and then it looses complete power. Windows then responds, the device found could not be installed. I then pull out the USB plug, insert it into another USB port, and let it find it, and then it starts working again. Then, a little bit later, the keyboard (USB) and mouse(USB) will both stop working at the same time, or sometimes independently. doing the same thing, no longer working, then powering down. (The keyboard, the LED's quit working.) So, I unplug them, and put them in different slots, or sometimes just wait, and it finds the devices and starts working. It's happened with 2 different mice, of which both are working devices.

As far as what I have plugged into USB, I have a mouse, a keyboard, and a printer. The motherboard I am using is an ABIT AT7 max, with 1 Gb of RAM, Athlon XP 2000, Geforce 4 Vid card.

This does not happen while I am not using the devices either.

I recently replaced the North-bridge chipset fan, but, that shouldn't have anything to do with it being that the USB is on the South Bridge.
The BIOS on the system was updated last night. Any suggestions?

 

It does sound like it might be a juice issue, I would have thought the system you have looks to need a 400w minimum good PSU.

An alternative would be you have a PS2 adaptor for the Keyboard try using that, also try using a PS2 mouse.

 

I've been running with the system as is for about a 2 years now, and it just started doing this 2 days ago. Unfortunatley, my motherboard has no PS2 ports at all. (The one board Abit did that way). I am wondering if perhaps my mouse has gone bad and is causing system problems. Voltage hasn't been a problem before.

 

I just repaired a laptop that had the USB sockets worked loose from the PCB due to rough handling. Most of them are pretty fragile, perhaps you have the same issue? FWIW, these worked "some of the time", but kept disconnecting, no surprise when they're no longer solidly soldered on!