well... after nearly 6 years... I finally fixed the usb on my computer... majorly annoying I must say. After lots of web searching and dead-ends I found an obscure comment that said to change the mps version from 1.4 (default) to 1.1... so my question is... what the hell does the multi-processors have to do with usb? But that means now I have internet to my desktop which is way cool. :) and hence downloading email... 1228 messages which takes approximately a half hour (joy of the rose email server).