First of all i'm new here so hello all I've been having some trouble rooting my phone - i've followed steps to create a gold card, restarrted the desire while holding back button then ran the testruu.exe from this tutorial How To Root Your HTC Desire & Add Apps2SD Nimbu
it got to 25% then it said 'usb device not recognized' and i had to do a hard reset of the phone. the phone still works fine but i cant run the ruu at all because my computer wont recognise the phone over usb!

EDIT: I uninstalled the device in 'device manager' and that seemed to work, then i discovered the r5 method of rooting and after running 'step1-windows.bat' i get so far but then an error happens, the phone restarts booloader then the device is not recognised all over again (see the screenshot)

EDIT (again): i've managed to root successfully using the the tinycore linux version, i think its just windows xp having issues with drivers, linux appears to have no difficulty