I have a new (less than 3 months old) Compaq laptop running Win XP pro.  I
have 3 internal usb 2.0 ports.  I have plugged a 4-usb hub into one of those
internal usb ports and use the hub to power an external hard drive, a CD
burner and a printer.  Last week I purchased a new hub – a step up to a 2.0
hub from my old 1.1.  I plugged it into the port and it just worked,
unpowered, great for about 3 days.  Then I began to be unable to access the
external hard drive.  Gradually the performance of the peripherals plugged
into the hub began to deteriorate until the computer didn’t recognize the hub
at all.  

I decided to power the hub.  After plugging in and booting up, all worked
perfectly for a short while.  Then performance gradually deteriorated again
until at times the computer again failed to even see that port.  I have
uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers without success.  Performance has
been very sporadic.

The other night we had a storm and a power outage.  Now the “bad” port
doesn’t seem to work at all – even for a flash drive or other device.

The other two internal usb ports work fine.  If I plug the hub into one of
the other two ports, it works fine.  But I don’t leave it there for very
long, because I’m afraid of developing the same problems with the “good”
ports.

After reading many posts, it seems that external hard drives are
particularly prone to problems when plugging them into a hub.  Does it just
“burn out” a usb port somehow?  Or do the drivers get corrupted?  I don’t
really even know if this is a hardware problem or a software problem.  Any
ideas on fixing this port would be appreciated.  I hate to see my new
computer losing port functionality.