I had the same problem with nothing in the Device Manager. I also couldn't add any new hardware, or get to My Network Places. I followed the excellent advice with fixing permissions in the registry but still had the same problem. Someone on a differerent forum or post mentioned problems with their services. I looked into that and found when I went to msconfig (Start >Run> msconfig)
under the services tab, just about every service was disabled. I clicked on "Enable All" and rebooted. Then everything worked fine. No idea how it happened, but thanks for the help. Hope this helps a little too.
Peace.
