SRS -

It must be a Win2000 thing. "Her" Win2K machine is the "host" for sharing the phone line for our internet dialup. The built-in ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) is supposed to pass my stuff back and forth to the web; but fairly frequently it just "forgets" that my machine is there. In order to get the connection back, I have to walk over to her machine, close the connection (hang up the phone), go back to my machine and open my browser - which almost every time triggers hers to redial a fresh connection, and remember that my machine is the one that asked for it. Maybe Win2K is just a little absent minded.

There is a known "bug" in Windows USB handling associated with the "green machine" sleep mode. If the USB controller receives a signal while it's in the process of entering standby mode, the device sometimes isn't recognized when the machine wakes back up. It's reported as only happening with a USB mouse, and Mickey's sage advice is "don't move the mouse while the machine is trying to go to sleep." I believe I saw something about a patch for it, but didn't need it so there's nothing in my log about it.

I don't see any reason why something similar couldn't happen with another kind of USB device. If you use a "time-out to standby" your anonymous USB devices could come from the same bug(?).

Beyond that, the usual suspects probably are "weak" cables and/or loose/dirty jacks.

Theoretically, you can plug two USB devices into the same port, and it sometimes works okay. Reliability is bad enough that a separate port for each device is the recommended practice. The really cheap hubs are little beyond a few resistors for matching the line impedances. When the machine asks for one of the devices, the request goes to all of them, and only the one "named" in the request is supposed to answer. (And the answer goes to all the USB devices, but it has the machine's name on it, so the other devices are supposed to ignore it.) The better "switching" hubs snatch the name of the device that's connected to each port during boot, or when a new device is plugged in. The switching hub only sends a request to the port for the device named, and sends the replies only to the machine. Cutting out the extra transmissions speeds things up slightly, although not enough to be noticeable in most cases. The real improvement is in the better reliability associated with having the talk on the USB system properly routed.

John