just throwing this out there to see if anyone has any thoughts.

I have someone's PC that the USB cord for the keyboard was severed.

After that happened, none of the USB ports work, but only in Windows.

USB keyboard works to get into the BIOS or do a startup device selection, but once control is handed off to windows, the USB ports stop working. They still have power, as the optical mouse lights up, but the devices do not actually load.

I booted a BartPE Live windows CD, which is like a live linux CD, and USB works fine in there, so its not a hardware issue, its something with the Windows install.

The tricky part here is that the machine is
1) small form factor, with no expansion slots, so adding in a USB pci card or something like that is not an option
2) there are no PS2 ports
3) there is a password on Windows, so I can't even get past the login screen in either safe mode or regular mode.

I was trying to find where the hardware information is stored in the registry, in hopes to delete and let windows reinstall it, but I don't even think that is possible to do if you can't get past the login screen, I can remote load the registry hive to modify it, but I don't think windows will reinstall the internal USB hub until it can get to the desktop.

Yes I can reinstall Windows, but I am trying to exhaust other options prior to doing that.