There are a couple of USB devices I have that once I use XP’s “Safely remove hardware” function, seem to render the port I had them in useless until the next reboot. In a unix-based o/s I imagine a simple unmount would do, but how do you force XP to recognize a USB port once something is removed from it?
Sounds like a driver issue to me - it is not typical Windows USB behaviour. There is not much you can do apart from try to find updated drivers for the USB device or interface.
Si