Hi pcstru. Very interesting thread. Thanks for your observations. It's been a few weeks now and I was wondering how you were getting on?

As an aside, I work with USB peripherals in live entertainment. One annoying thing that laptops tend to do is power down the USB ports as part of the power saving scheme. The first thing we do with show-critical systems is turn off that feature in the Device Manager. I wonder if that could be part of your USB issues?