First- many thanks to all for your help. The problem was that my computer was putting the Arduino on virtual port 15, but the software saw it on port 6. I'm still not sure why this happened, but manually setting the software to port 15 solved the problem. I blame Windows.

Lefty-

Loopback test failed for all boards, on all computers.

I have now tried 3 Arduino Duemilanove boards on 3 different computers, 4 different USB cables (3 known good, one brand new), and 2 different versions of the software (022 and 1.0.3). WTF?? everything was working fine last week, now NOTHING works. Same errors each time, with each board. Help...please...

Unknown. Don't use many type B connectors. Have some more in my lab-will try those tomorrow, and failing that, I will just purchase a new cable and check it out on my home laptop, and my programming computer at work. Thanks for all the suggestions. We often forget the fine art of troubleshooting right when we need it most!

Didn't help. I will get a new USB2 cable tomorrow...or the next day. I have seen a few posts about this problem recently. Is it common?

Do I need to re-install the FTDI drivers? Windows shut my machine down for a series of patches last week just before I began having this problem.

Fail. I know the cords are good, and the usb ports work for other devices. What's up?? And thanks for the prompt reply!

peter

I have been happily programming my Arduino Duemilanove boards for about a year now. Last week I started getting the following error message: "avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00" Figuring I had toasted the MCU I burned the bootloader into a new ATMega328 and popped it into the board. Same error. I bought new pre-burned chip from Adafruit Industries, a new board, tried those. Same error. Had been using the 022 release of the Arduino software, so I upgraded to the 1.0.3 version. Tried numerous cables, different known good usb ports on my computer, all to no avail. I am running Windows XP media edition on a gateway laptop with an AMD Athlon 64 cpu. Any suggestions?

I have been getting the same error for a week now. What is going on?