My Galaxy S2 will not recognise the power cable or usb cable

Hi
I have a Galaxy S2 that I love to death but it has had some problems. The current one has the following symptoms:

- if you plug in either a power cable or the usb cable nothing happens at all, nada
- it will not use the cable to charge up.
- however if you plug either cable in and then power the phone off, it restarts itself, unasked, and then it is charging. But there is still no other recognition that the cable is connected.
- The pc does not recognise that a device has been plugged in (but it does recognise other devices in the same usb socket)
- so kies does not start on either machine and no data transfer is possible.

The phone has no difficulty with the mobile network or my wifi network, so I have been able to use kies air to transfer photos. But the charging thing and the physical link failure are annoying.

Any ideas?

You mean, on the desktop? Yes, and the current version of kies.. originally it would communicate via kies but it no longer does so.
I have noticed that when powering up the phone one of the messages that comes up at the top of the screen is "usb cable connected," even though it is not.. I am wondering if some state in the phone has become reversed, so that it thinks there is a cable when there isn't and thinks there isn't when there is.. maybe a hard reset would fix it?

OK, well we have some progress. I did a factory reset, and now the phone recognises that a cable has been plugged in and will start to charge itself. If the phone is switched off, the battery icon appears onscreen and the phone no longer switches itself on automatically. So far so normal.

The remaining problem is that I still cannot get the pc to recognise anything if the usb cable is plugged in. Originally when I plugged it in kies would start up automatically but not now.

How can I get that changed? Kies says it is up to date and that the driver is up to date.. maybe try reinstalling kies? But surely even without kies the pc should recognise that *something* has been plugged into a usb port?

I should add, neither usb debugging or the mass storage option have any effect.

hey have you managed to figure this out?, i have exactly the same problem, ive tried everything, my cpu just will not recognise the gs2, not in kies or mass storage. its driving me crazy , carphone warehouse said i will have to send it away and it will take 2 to 4 weeks to sort!!! too long without my phone for my liking

Had the same problem and i discovered  that  i had the blue-tooth on. I had to turn it off, and BINGO, now the PC see the phone