Just reporting some anecdotal bits to suggest that the USB issue has not gone away with a new Davis Vantage Pro and Weatherlink 5.8.1 - out of the box. Not asking for help at this time - I have now read all the USB hints here and will try them out when able to next trek out to my remote station.
Just bought a new Davis Vantage Pro (wireless) with 6510 USB data logger from Ambient. Worked without fail for two weeks, 24/7, in my backyard while using Meteohub/Weatherhub as the USB and Internet interface between the station console and www.wunderground.com. Since I was using the Meteohub I did not need to use the Weatherlink software.
I then moved the rig to my remote location. Once there a power failure revealed that the Meteohub solution was not going to work as the Meteohub does not automatically restart itself after power failure - gotta manually press a button on the front of the device. Thought briefly about just adding a UPS but then another issue surfaced with the Meteohub approach and I decided to dump it and change over to using a PC 24/7. Set up a brand new Windows Vista (32 bit) machine, installed WeatherLink 5.8.1, and opened up a good book. Three hours later the USB connection to the console hung/dropped. Pulled the plug, put it back in and all was well - for four hours. Over the next 24 hours, the USB connection dropped every three to five hours. Was always correctable by simply pulling the USB plug and reinserting it. OK - I figured probably a Vista thing. So I pulled a dependable, two year old Windows XP Home Edition PC notebook out of the trunk of the car and set it up. Worked fine for two days and I went home happy except for missing my favorite notebook PC. A day and a half later, the USB dropped. A neighbor reset the PC for me and data flowed for maybe 18 hours before stopping again. I don’t want to bother the neighbor again so the next round of experiments will have to wait until I can travel to the remote location.
Throughout the adventures above, a Panasonic IP network camera (connected to the router by ethernet) chugged along without incident, cheerfully uploading its view once per minute.
Best regards, Major H, [email protected].