I replaced my seemingly-defective Abit IP-35E recently with a Gigabyte P35-DS3L.

When I was first fiddling around with it, my monitor signal shut off when I plugged a USB cable-- not even connected to a device-- into the front port.

It did this once, then couldn't be repeated.

I recieved one of those generic 64-in-1 card readers today, and installed it in my front panel. I had to notch the reader's case to accomodate the mounting rails for my case (it was evidently built to match NO other device in the universe).

The reader is plugged into one of the DS3L's three front USB headers. The cards read fine, so I suspect it's plugged in right (it was keyed anyway) The issue is the built-in front-USB port.


If I plug a cable, or the cable with device, into the reade's port, it almost always shuts off the monitor. I suspect the PC still runs underneath. I've barely broken the plane of the port-- probably not even hooking up data lines.

I notice, however, if I let the machine boot and SIT long enough to do the seek it always does on my USB scanner (Canon D1230U), it seems like I might be able to plug and unplug the socket all I want.

Is Vista (32-bit Ultimate) or the board just really sensitive to "don't start fiddling with USB until I'm done booting!!"

I could be wrong on this, but this smells like it's part of Vista's new 'protection' schemes.

There was a great article written detailing some of the crap that MS did to Vista so they could get AACS to run so you could view next gen DVD's on it . . . and it tells a lot about what hardware creators have also had to do in order to get their MS Certifications.

One of the big things is the system monitors voltages heavily in video cards to make sure there's no attempt to 'hijack' the direct Hi Def feed, and if the voltage varies enough, the video subsystems reboot. This shouldn't cause the monitor to shut down and not come back, but this IS Microsoft we're talking about.

The article is here and the specific section on hardware requirements is here.

Now, this also could be a driver that needs updating, so please check on those.

But this is my $.02.

d