ghunter,
It's been a while, but I think I remember what I did to fix the problem. This solution assumes that you have a similar Lenovo laptop.
Go to
www.lenovo.com and follow the links to the support page. Enter your specific product ID number, and go to the "drivers & downloads" section. It should display a list of drivers available for your system, starting with the most recent. USB is supported by your motherboard, which requires its own driver. Mine was called "Intel Chipset Support for Windows XP - 3000 C200 N100".
Download and run the .exe file - it will ask you to specify a location to extract the files to. Remember where you saved them. Finish doing whatever the installation program tells you to. Then, restart.
Go to the Windows Control Panel, and double click the item titled "system". Click the "Device Manager" button under the tab labeled "Hardware". This should give you a list of all of the devices running on your computer. The ones with driver problems will have a yellow question mark (or something like that).
Right-click one of the USB controllers that is giving you problems and select the option to install or update the driver. Select "install from a specific location". In the next window, select "Search for the best driver in these locations". Uncheck "Search removable media", and check "Include this location in the search". In the box below, type in the address of the folder where you extracted the drivers from the installation software. (There should be a .ini file in that folder).
Follow the rest of the prompts, and your problem should be solved. Good luck.