When attempting to install a digital camera I can install the software and connect the camera to the USB port, but when attempting to install the hardware through the ‘Add/Remove Hardware’ control panel, a message appears saying ‘Updating hardware database’. No matter how long I leave this window the progress bar does not move past 0% and I must press CTRL-ALT-DEL to return to the desktop. If I attempt to manually select the hardware to install (rather than have Windows automatically detect the hardware) the same message appears and goes nowhere. The computer is running Windows Me.

This problem is commonly caused by the WindowsInf directory (which stores setup information for hardware) being filled with 0 byte files. If there are a lot of these files, it can max-out the amount of files which can be present in one directory, thus not allowing new setup information files (such as for your digital camera) to be placed into this directory. Another issue is Windows must read through all these empty files (which could be up to 40,000 files) when going through the Add/Remove Hardware wizard, thus causing your computer to grind to a halt. This behaviour can be caused by disk utility programs (in particular, Norton System Doctor). To fix the problem, open Windows Explorer and go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Folder Options’. Click the ‘View’ tab and enable ‘Show hidden files and folders’ and disable ‘Hide protected operating system files’. Go to the C:WindowsInf folder. Look in this directory to check if you have a lot of files with the name ‘oem*.inf’ (where * is a wildcard) which have a size of 0 bytes. You may find that you have thousands (or tens of thousands) of these files in the directory. Select and delete all the oem*.inf files which have a size of 0 bytes. NB: Do NOT delete any other files in this directory, or any oem*.inf files which do not have a size of 0 bytes. If there are a lot of files you need to delete, an easy way to select the files are to sort the files by size, so that all the 0 byte files are listed consecutively. You may also need to delete the files in chunks, due to the large number. In any case, be aware this will be a time consuming process!

To prevent this problem from happening again, if you are running Norton System Doctor make sure this utility is disabled before updating Windows Me.