USB - nothing will install!

Just a got a bunch of laptops for staff and are gradually working through them. One of them is being slightly annoying in that anything you plug in to it (usb interface) it simply wont install the appropriate drivers for (primarily usb flash drives). Usually it would pick it up automatically within 20secs or so, or occasionally say it's found something and request input for installation.
The latter in this case happens, but then it enters an endless loop of "installing the device", but never seems to actually finish it!

Some suggestions I have searched said uninstall all usb controllers, reboot and it will find them and reinstall; well, it found them fine, but trying to reinstall gives the same problem as installing drivers for the flash drive.

Is there a known fix to this problem? Pointing the installation request to a folder containing the driver files doesn't force it to install either - again enters a loop. If the machines goes in standby (as it's left doing it for so long), it'll come back and say it failed to install. I don't want to reinstall windows due to the amount of things we have installed and copied to it in the past few days. Driving me crazy!

Can you take an image of one that is fully working and re-image this machine?

I could easily have used the restore disk, but then lose the installed apps and copied files individual to the machine ;)

Just on a hunch, I selected the option to choose manually from a list, and it shows the appropriate driver(s) in there, then installs fine! How bizarre! It obviously has the drivers and works fine if manually searched, yet it can't find them automatically, no matter how long I give it. Although an inconvenience slightly for any future devices, at least I found a workaround to it. The fact I couldn't get it working at all before was getting rather frustrating.

Some things I wont attempt to understand :p