A bit odd, this one, so I'm posting it in case anyone else has had the problem...

My main PC (this one) is rarely switched off, just restarted occasionally after some updates, and I have a couple of USB hubs attached.

Last week I had a message bubble to say a USB device had malfunctioned, and it turned out to be one of the hubs (USB 2) which was returning the message. I temporarily replaced it with an old USB 1,1 hub, which worked fine...

As the 'failed' hub has been plugged in constantly for some years, I decided to go and buy a replacedment... which gave me the same message!

So I naturally figured that maybe neither of them was faulty, and it was a problem with the USB port hardware or driver... rather than wade in with both feet and wreck everything, I trawled around the net for a while, and found out that it's a known issue with USB 2 ports.

Most people advised that I should uninstall the USB drivers, restart in 'Safe Mode' and delete all the driver files... which seems rather drastic, although I have had to do similar things with dodgy video drivers and such.

One glimmer of hope, which seemed too good to be true, was a suggestion that the port controller chip had crashed, and that I simply needed to shut the PC down and unplug the power cord for a minute or so.

I duly did this, and... IT WORKED! The old hub is now happily sitting in its customary place, and working just as well as before!

Nobody was more surprised than me...!

Hopefully this will be of help to others. The reason why a restart didn't clear the fault? Most motherboards these days need the 5v rail (which also powers the USB ports) to enable the software 'power switch' to operate - which is one reason why you should always pull the power cord out before changing memory chips, CPU etc. As the 5v was keeping the USB chips 'live', they did not get a 'cold reboot'... so they wouldn't function in USB 2 mode, yet still worked in USB 1.1 mode!

Hah!