Reset caused by "operation in progress" corrupted USB drivers

Last night when shutting down my computer it went into the dreaded "Operation in Progress" message. Since it was the end of the day and I wouldn't need the computer until morning, I let it run. This morning the message was still on the screen and presumably would be there for eternity.

I had to resort to a system reset. After the reset I lost contact with my two external Seagate drives on USB3 and also my front panel memory card readers, also a USB3 device.

The devices were detected by the Device Manager, but had the yellow exclamation on them indicating there was an issue. The error said:

"Reinstall the drivers for this device. (Code 18)"

I got the latest drives from Asus and Intel and installed them with no success. I uninstalled the devices and let the hardware wizard find them and re-install them, no success.

I also noticed when checking the USB drivers there were not just the two MS drivers, but also two Acronis drivers. I had uninstalled Acronis hoping that would fix the problem, but Acronis didn't clean up it's drivers and I bet a regedit would find garbage there too.

The usb device drivers were:

disk.sys
fltsrv.sys acronis
partmgr.sys
vsflt67.sys acronis

I manually went into command prompt mode and deleted the two identified as Acronis and that made no difference either.

The device mgr says my drives are up to date, there are no Windows updates to run, and the Windows fixer program found no errors.

I should comment that even when moving the external Seagate drives from a USB3 port to a USB2 port, they still don't work. Other USB devices like the keyboard and mouse do work and when I plugin my phone it is recognized. There is just something about USB3 devices, even when not in a USB3 port that isn't working.

I am running Windoze 7 Pro SP1

I did a chat with support but they won't support Home 2012 and haven't taken responsibility for their "Operation in Progress" problem being the cause.

I do not want to have to rebuild the entire C: drive to correct the problem.

Help please...