I have a emachine T2542 desk top and it displays a power surge window andstates it will shut down that USB port. It has done that many tmes and now all my USB ports do not function. Is this a hardware problem or is it a XP home OS problem? Otherwise the computer works fine.

What are you plugging into it ? That's what might be the real problem. Heavy loads and unbuffered loads can caus surges or " spikes " to occur.

As mentioned, what are you plugging in?

Does this only happen when 1 device is plugged in or any USB device and does this happen when the same device is plugged into any USB port

Can you post the exact message you get?

Check your device mgr for any yellow marks

Start, settings, control panel, system, hardware tab, device mgr

Just as much info as as possible

This surge notice happens when nothing is plugged into the USB ports

Check what processes you have running in task mgr and if anything looks odd or unfamiliar, post it here or you can Google name of program

Have you checked device mgr for errors?

Have you scanned for malware or use antivirus at all?

Here is the exact power surge message
"A USB device has exceeeded the power limitsof its hub port".
I use McAfee Anti virus. Do you think it could be a virus or malware problem?
Nothing odd in the program section

Doing a search found some info that may be useful

I did find info of how to not display error message, but that would not address the issue.

This from other source and it does make sense:

So in Device Manager I disabled USB Universal Host Controllers until I had the one that was causing the problem (error stopped). I then uninstalled this device, went to "Add Remove Hardware" in the Control Panel and did a scan for new hardware. A new device was detected (USB Universal Host Controller) and XP reinstalled this device.

Note: There were three controllers listed however only two root hubs were shown. After the process described above it is 3 for 3.

I have not had a problem with this laptop since then. I would like to do a load the next time without anything plugged into a USB port, just to see if this problem occurs with or without anything plugged in.

Give this a try to see if it would be a controller issue, if still happening post back