I've had the problem numerous times that was always caused when I had a card in the slot when it auto powered off. What I ended up having to do each time was go in the device manager and remove damg near every device, restard and let it find the slot again. The aggravating part is this is time comsuming and even though I spent a good 4 hours on days trying to determine exactly what was fixing the problem I never could narrow it down. So pretty much when it happens now I dang near strip my device manager bare of everything that doesn't auto reinstall itself before a restart and then there will be power to my pcmcia card again.