USB Wierdness

I've had a USB flash memory drive for over a year and never had a problem. Until this morning. The error was "The installation failed because a function driver was not specified for this device instance".

Nice. Lots of advice on how to fix it on various places from editing or deleting the offending driver file to checking the BIOS. In the end, unplugging it and replacing it after 5 seconds fixed it, without changing a thing.