We have a Windows XP SP3 laptop (Acer Travelmate 7320) to which we connect a variety of astronomy equipment (a telescope, its mount, some cameras and others) all of which connect through USB.

When we plug in these devices, Windows tells us that it detects the hardware and installs the driver. All of these devices then function correctly using the software that came from the vendor (unfortunately, one of the vendors does not support Vista 64, and that is why we're using our XP laptop).

However when we reboot the computer we experience a variety of symptoms: Windows reports that it found new hardware for some of the devices and tries to reinstall their drivers, and for some of the other devices needs to be unplugged and plugged in again before they are detected again by the operating system, in which case Windows still tries to reinstall their drivers.

It is as if Windows does not remember that it has already installed the drivers. Is this a common problem on Windows XP? If so, what can be done about it?

Should we rather be looking at the laptop's firmware and drivers? We've looked into updating the drivers for the chipset, but this did not solve the problem.

Thank you in advance.