Thanks for the reply, after playing last night and much of this morning I
finally decided to load a clean copy of U-8.10.

I seem to have at least two problems.

the first is that I may have an intermittent solder joint on one of the USB port
connectors, of course it's the one I use.

The other was that the Pre- release of U-8.10 that I was using until a few
minutes ago may have been corrupted.

Now with the new 8.10 install and the correct USB connector everything seems to
be working fine.

I'll have to take the mother board out and do some rework on it to get it going
again.

Or I can just move everything over to a new mother board and be done with it.

Hope keeps you going ... Fear keeps you alive!
Brought to you by Ubuntu 8.10, and FireFox 3.0.3 through the magic of Linux.