I think it was the SE boards that had the more serious USB problems. Tony's thread, linked above, explains things very well, although when the issue was first discovered/solved, I remember reading that they had capacitors in place instead of resistors, or vice versa, on the USB lines. Can't quite recall. At any rate, the USB problem on the XE is theoretically fixable, whereas the SE's is probably not.
The impact of the XE USB fault is that devices are not hot pluggable. The workaround - before PCI USB drivers were available - was to use a hub. The hub would remain "permanently" attached to the motherboard, and then you could hot plug into that. I'm using one of
these and it works well. If USB2 speed isn't important to you, this solution saves you a PCI slot (not that there are a whole lot of interesting cards you can use...).
