I have problems on both machines from gettin the USB to work to games not crashing all the time.
When talking about games you probably mean old-school WHDLoad games and similar, not modern system-friendly games.
Those old games usually disable the OS. A disabled OS cannot react on interrupts. An unhandled interrupt causes the system to freeze / crash. So any hardware which causes interrupts needs to be disabled before you can run games. This includes network interfaces, USB controllers and others.
WHDLoad has an option to run a script before a game starts and another one when the game ends. In this script you can disable the USB stack and enable it again afterwards.
