I have two generic 4-port USB hubs that are supposed to be USB 2.0
compliant. The older one is fine, works as advertised. Meanwhile the
newer one sometimes shows up under the USB 2.0 root hub (i.e.
"Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller"), or usually it shows
up under the slower "Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller" (USB 1.1).

My motherboard (Asus M2NPV-VM) USB ports are all USB 2.0 compliant,
and they individually auto-detect whether they need to switch down to
USB 1.1 speeds. I'm using a Microsoft tool called UVCView under
Windows XP to display the details of the USB devices, including the
hubs and roothubs.

According to UVCView, the older hub and newer hub seem to have the
same chipset vendor (idVendor = "Genesys Logic, Inc."), although
externally they look quite different and have different brand names.
So I'm not sure why one would be consistently USB 2.0 compliant, while
the other one is not.

Now another interesting thing I noticed is that the inconsistent hub
will only show up as USB 2.0-compliant after I boot into Windows after
having previously rebooted from Ubuntu 7.10 Linux (dual-boot system).
So maybe Linux does something to the device that puts it right. But
when I list the devices while in Linux I see that it is listed under
USB 1.1 just like when in Windows. I have no idea why Linux leaves the
hub fixed for Windows, but doesn't fix it for itself?!

Any idea what's going on with this hub?

Yousuf Khan

What you may want to do since you are running an Asus board, is go into
Bios setup on bootup before your OS loads. Under one of the tabs across
the top, there is a check for "I am using an OS that checks for plug and
play" or something like that. It may be that your Bios is not setting
the USB ports and allow only the operating system to do that. It sounds
as if Windows is setting the USB port/hubs and then you switch into
Linux. Anyway, might be worth a try.