[TJ Drifter]

I have a HP pavillion 8860 with asus a7v-vm motherboard. It has 2 usb ports in back connected directly to the MB and 2 in front connected with a cable to a header on the MB. Up until a couple months ago all 4 worked fine. When pluging in my digital camera the camera software would open automatically and I was able to transfer pictures. Then all 4 quit working, I did not take the time to figure out what was wrong and assumed the camera had broken. I now have a 2 gig MP3 player and my computer won't detect it either. I have tried the camera on other computers and it works fine, so I know the trouble lies with the usb ports.
I have tried everything I know(which isn't much) to fix this problem and have gotten nowhere. Can you help me figure this out please?

The following is what I have tried so far:
1) updated my MB bios to latest version
2) removed usb root hubs(2) and USB universal host controller(2) from my device manager. upon restart all four of these items are found by plug and play and are reinstalled.
3) unplugged and replugged the cable from MB which connects the front 2 usb ports

I am not sure what system info would be helpful
what I know offhand is the following:
motherboard is Asus a7v-vm
AMD athlon m4 thunderbird 1 gig processor
384mb sdram (128mb & 256mb chips)
via chipset
USB ports are version 1.1