Thanks for your patience.

Incredibly, the USB keyboard is being recognized by the drive scanner AND NOW by avast!.

I can only assume that my ECS K7S5A motherboard (one that has a tendency to suffer BIOS amnesia from time to time) finally recognized the USB keyboard in DOS-mode.

Everything works as it should. :-\

I appreciate the help and am glad this problem has “healed” itself :wink: