Well, I got things sorted. I got them sorted quite a while ago, but I have just emerged from the cave of my Masters and I resolve to begin catching up on my blogging – I haven’t been hibernating, I just haven’t done any reporting on my activities.

Okay, back to the kernel – I went through the process again, and I still had USB issues, but everything else worked. I got a bit of help from TLUG and discovered that my problems went away if I typed sudo modprobe ehci_hcd and sudo modprobe uhci_hcd, which are the modules for USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 respectively. After a bit more looking, I found that the reason I had some old, unused modules loading was that they were in /etc/modules. So, I extrapolated, put the USB modules in and commented the obsoleted ones out, and Bob’s your uncle, everything works.