I applied all the latest Windows XP "critical" security patches to my machine. Rebooted. And I couldn't sync with my cel phone any more. Grumble.

If you Google around for things like "Nokia DKU-5 problems", you'll find lots of ways that these things can be misinstalled and the hell you need to go through to get everything just right. I blew two hours yesterday on that and eventually got stuck with "Driver cannot start (Error Code 10)". Helpful, no?

Today, I called in one our sysadms to see if he could make sense out of it. We disabled and reinstalled all kinds of drivers. No good. Our big "ah-hah" moment came when we plugged my cel phone directly into the computer's USB port rather than the hub in the back of my monitor. Suddenly it all worked. Plugging and unplugging the USB cable for the monitor (Apple 23" Cinema HD with DrBott adapter), we found that the monitor was showing up as an "Unrecognized USB Device" rather than a USB hub. We power-cycled the monitor by pulling the plug on the DrBott adapter and now everything works properly again. The monitor's USB hub showed up as it was supposed to and everything plugged into there also showed up properly.

*sigh*