pavane -

If you only have one USB port, it's very important that you "unmount" a device before you pull the plug to remove it. You may already have been doing this, but it's a common cause of problems. You should have a "safe remove" button in the tool tray at the bottom of the Windows screen. If you don't, you may have to look elsewhere for instructions.

Some older systems, and older devices, were simply not designed for "hot removal" and you had to shut down the machine, preferably BEFORE removing a device. You also had to reboot when you plugged in a new USB device to get PnP to run, recognize the new device, and install an appropriate driver. If a device you attach needs a special driver, you may need to "archive" the driver install file(s) somewhere on the machine so that PnP will be able to find and reinstall the right one during reboot; --- and you may need to figure out a way to prevent installation of a "generic" driver from the backup .CAB library. If you have one of these older machines, you're unlikely to find much in your driving manual, since in the time frame when stuff like this was sold there was no hot-removable stuff around, so of course they didn't include instructions.

In a desktop, you can usually install a USB Port Card if there's an available slot, ignore the old connectors, and get all the newer goodies; but in a laptop there may be no usable way to update the existing port(s).

The DVD hijack of the USB suggests that your port was an old one that doesn't support more than one device at a time. The system has to support knowing a separate name for each device on the USB loop. There may be a way to reconfigure the installation to get it to recognize the hub, and use multiple device names to get through it to multiple devices; but that information has slipped out of the bottom of my data storage bin if it was ever there. If you have an "XP Machine" – built since XP was around, and with the OS installed when you got it – you shouldn't have to worry about this. If you've upgraded to WinXP on an older machine, it's hard to guess where all the clinkers may be.

If you're using a reader with your memory sticks, it's the reader that has to be recognized. The driver that the reader needs may depend on the format of the stick that's in it, and there are variations in the formatting of memory cards/sticks. You should be able to swap sticks to another of the same format, but changing to another format may require dismounting the reader and remounting it with a different driver. Newer readers do this automatically, but an older one may not.

Memory sticks/cards are just like disks or drives. They can be reformatted; but I'd suggest understanding your situation a little better before going that route. It's probably not reversible.

If you're talking about the little cards that stuff in a card slot in your laptop, then changing to a different card may require dismount/remount as for any other change to a new USB device, and depending on your machine, it may mean shut down – remove – insert – reboot.

It's good that the sticks are USB2, but they'll run as USB1 if that's what your port (and/or hub) is. Most hubs you're likely to have found should be USB-2. They should fall back to USB-1 if there's a USB-1 device in the loop, but some really old ones, and a few super-cheap ones, have to be told via setup changes to run as USB-1 if there's any USB-1 device on the loop.

John