Spontaneous USB Connect & Disconnect Sounds

[mark-ibmtp]

I recently got a T43 in very good condition. I've been using it about 3 months now, with no misbehavior until about an hour ago.

Windows XP users will be familiar with distinctive sounds that play when XP detects that a USB device has been newly attached, or an attached USB device has been disconnected. The machine is making these sounds at random intervals. I think it is typically connect-sound followed within a second or two by disconnect-sound, but I have paid a lot more attention to their appearing when they shouldn't happen at all, than their pattern.

There has been no USB device connected to the machine, since the last time it powered on.

Sometimes this will happen 2 or 3 times in a minute, and sometimes 10+ minutes will go by without it. It shows no signs of abating. I haven't rebooted yet, I started a security scan (in case there is some malware at work). The HD is quite large, and it takes several hours to run all my scan tools (I've started with rootkit revealer).

My intuition is that this is more likely a hardware gremlin on the mainboard

Does anyone have experience of, or has learned from others about, such a symptom?

PS -- I tried opening Device Manager, which refreshes when I hear the last sounds, but shows no change in the expanded display under "Universal Serial Bus controllers". This display has 10 entries:
4 Intel 82801FB/FBM USB Universal HCs
1 Intel 82801FB/FBM USB2 Enhanced HC
5 USB Root Hubs
I don't recall, whether that is the normal situation.

Thanks in advance, for any information!

[RealBlackStuff]

Those are one of the symptoms of a Southbridge chip beginning to fail.
Throughout the laptop's life it heats up/cools down continuously when you switch it On/Off.
Then the laptop gets moved around, quite likely picked up the wrong way (as in: one of the front corners), which causes the motherboard to 'flex'.
Eventually that chip (which is soldered to the motherboard with ca. 600 solder balls) becomes unsoldered at one point or another.
That causes intermittent functioning of CD or hHD or USB or many other parts.
To remedy that, the chip needs to be 'reballed' or the motherboard replaced.
Look at this to see what reballing is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... --U1axjD74
Unfortunately there's no reliable company in the USA who can do this at a reasonable price.
Shipping to/from the UK, where there is such a facility, is prohibitive, so a replacement mobo will be required.

[mark-ibmtp]

Follow-up on the issue:

1. The malware scans came up clean.

2. Before I shutdown the T43, I used Device Manager to delete and then renew all of the USB controller & hub entries. This apparently made no difference, as the noises happened a couple of times very shortly after I did this.

3. Since I powered the T43 down, I have run it 20+ hours without any recurrence of the symptom.

I am very much aware of the BGA problems with these motherboards. The machine being relatively "new" for a T43, I hoped to be immune for a while.

I would more expect a chip contact failure to show up if a USB device were attached, in which case the noise pattern would be disconnect followed quickly by connect. But anything can happen, when contacts are intermittent.

While the symptom was occurring, I did try placing some mechanical stress (twisting moments) on the machine to test whether it had any effect on the incidence: I didn't detect any. Since then, the mainboard has done a lot of temperature cycling, spending most of its time below about 56C (normal quiescent for this machine), but with numerous long stretches in the 90s during CPU-intensive procedures.

Of course, I would like to believe that the misbehavior was due to some software state (or chip register state) condition that was cleared by the time the machine powered down. But only time will tell! If it does recur, I'll boot into Linux, where I can see log messages from every USB connect or disconnect.

PS I tried to look at the System Event Log, to see whether there might be any clue -- and found it useless. It turns out there is a known problem with a driver used by TPFanControl, that floods the log with messages (several per second). I made a patch to acpiec.sys that is referenced elsewhere on this forum, and stopped the mega-messages. I don't have any reason to believe this was relevant to my USB anomaly.

[RealBlackStuff]

Maybe time to do a thorough inspection of your USB ports?
There might be dirt in it or a bent/broken contact.