My wife's Dell Inspiron 600m has gone bonkers. We ordered it with all the options, including Dell's internal Bluetooth device, apparently made by Cambridge Silicon Radio. What's happening: the Bluetooth icon in the tray will show a white logo on a blue field (as it should), but then will turn red and you'll hear the sound of "oh, a device seems to have disconnected". Windows XP then handily offers that "one of the USB devices connected to this computer has malfunctioned" and you can click the balloon for help, but you have to be quick because if the Bluetooth resurrects itself before you can click the balloon, too bad for you. After finally clicking the thing, it unhelpfully told me that one of the USB hubs had something unknown connected to it.

We haven't installed anything particularly unusual on this machine. No weird spyware; AdAware only found three tracking cookies. All the latest Microsoft patches and Dell patches have been installed. Web surfing is done through Firefox, not IE. The Bluetooth drivers are whatever Dell shipped with the machine, rather than whatever else (e.g., various Google searches have turned up instructions for removing Microsoft drivers, but it's not at all clear that I either have them or want to remove them).

I thought, maybe I could just go to the boot screen and disable the Bluetooth altogether, since we're not using it for anything yet. Unfortunately, the BIOS only allows me to disable all wireless. We use the 802.11 all the time, so that's no good.

Any thoughts? Am I looking at a hardware problem?

I would say it was hardware. My bluetooth on my iBook is just a USB device too, it appears in the system profiler. Being an option it could've worked it's way loose. I haven't a clue where to look, I remember my Lat had loads of flaps and panels on the bottom so I suppose you could look under there.

It looks like physically removing it would be a pain on the 600m model. It's under the palm rest, so the display would have to be removed then the palm rest to get at it.