Brian and Niko, you are spot on with taking this in the direction of power issues on the USB bus.
With something as popular as Belkin powered hubs, and HP printers, to more exotic gear like our stations, the number one USB issue on the Mac is/has been for many years, power management strategies and hardware states affecting the recognition of USB devices especially after sleep, deep sleep (hibernation) or even disk spin downs.
Google is peppered with these issues (773,000 hits with "leopard usb after sleep") and I believe it may play a role here now that we know there is a hub involved.
This has been an issue on Macs, love'em or not, since my Mac Lombard laptop was introduced with the first working USB port on a business laptop back in '99 I think. That's why I paid 4 k for it back then lol. (I digress though)
The scoop is that Apple handles power management different than Windows, even Windows running in Paralells and Fusion. I recall my Dell laptop sitting there in a meeting cooking the table because it was connected to my Treo, and just would not let go of the USB device. Connecting to the Lombard, older by then, I remember killing the batteries because I couldn't let it go to sleep or I would have to restart to remount the device.
On the desktops as USB got popular, it fast became the biggest issue with drivers and devices. On the Mac, miserly energy settings/capabilities were having huge impacts on all usb devices, and "failure to mount after sleep" variants were the biggest issue.
Hence, management of the Energy Control Panel is the most significant deterrent to this issue, especially for mission critical devices on the Mac, where a Windows system will hold onto the device, the Mac will not hesitate to let it go in favor of a user's energy settings. So in Energy Control panel, it is advisable to move the slider never sleep, as well as uncheck "allow disks to sleep..." as this has an impact on recognition of devices on the usb ports.
Also, on almost every mission critical device built for the Mac, you will see many references to advice of plugging that device directly into the Mac's built in USB ports. Although this is not as much of an issue until you have a problem, I do suggest all weather device owners follow that convention as even on my Keyspan, I can duplicate failed recognition when not plugged in directly to the Mac.
As an interesting sidebar, a Fusion or Paralells equipped Mac running Windows will not have the same issues connecting to these devices even on the same hardware, so it needs to be considered during setup... and of course those environments grabbing and not letting go of the USB ports on there host Macs are a very well known and documented issue, requiring very specific actions and vigilance from the user to prevent that from occurring. I have had that challenge in my Fusion environment specific to WD and my station although lately it seems better from both the above platforms running XP.
The last big issue I have seen over the years has to do with users that have changed ports/hubs/and other modes of connection from their device to the Mac, and not had them recognized/remounted for some time , or ever. It happened to me when I decided to go with wireless printing by connecting an Anycom 300 to my Mac via bluetooth way back when it was new technology, and connecting a USB printer to that (a Samsung Laser), now that was a day of challenges, but it is still in use here today, 5 years later lol... but back then, every thing crashed on me... numerous times.. until I got the hardware reset after changing ports so often in one day. This is usually an issue at the hardware level where the nvram/pram/smu is just plain confused. In each of these cases unplugging all usb devices except for the one in question, and resetting the pram/smu/nvram (whichever applies to your Mac), takes care of this issue, and then reconnecting everything else in any order.
The above is of course assuming all permissions on the startup disk have been repaired and the disk verifies ok using Disk Utility.
Now I don't know if this is the answer to Cyberdog's issues or not, as a disclaimer lol, but I do know these techniques and issues have come into play on every device connection issue I have had on my Macs since the technology was introduced. I can say though, that I now almost never experience these issues with recognition/connection/mounting/remounting/sleeping of USB devices, once I followed these conventions.
Hope this helps
Jim
