I would like to thank everybody who responded to my plea for help. I did a lot of research during the past 48 hours or so and was able to correct *SOME* of my problems with USB. Below I am summarizing my findings for the benefits of all. Upon close scrutiny, it seems that the syntax for '/etc/udev/rules.d/*.rules' files has changed a bit from SuSE 9.3 to SuSE 10.0. (These files enable the new hotplugging system udev to assign persistent names to peripherals which may be hotplugged in random order. For example, if you have two different USB storage devices, with the proper set of rules you can make them show up each with the same mountable partition, regardless of the order they are plugged in.) These changes are *not* documented in the SuSE 10.0 manual. Look, for example, at the bottom of page 492 of the SuSE 10.0 manual (available for download at http://www.novell.com/documentation/suse10/pdfdoc/suse10_ref/suse10_ref.pdf) and p. 349 of the printed SuSE 9.3 manual. You will observe that comparing for BUS keys now (in SuSE 10.0) requires a double equals sign, while in 9.3 a single equals sign worked. After changing the pertinent device rules to conform to the SuSE 10.0 syntax (and multiple reboots) yesterday, my cellphone and 512MB USB stick (which, by the way, carries an encrypted file system) began to work. I plugged and unplugged them hot several times in different order and the USB bus did not lock up. The cellphone looks like a USB dialup modem again, as it should (albeit a lot faster than a "real" one connected to a landline), pppd handles it as such just fine --as it should-- and the same peer, secrets, and chat files work, so I can surf wirelessly through it again. The USB compact flash card reader still does not show up as a partition, but it does no longer seem to lock up the USB bus (two days ago, the USB bus locked up and recognized no hot(un)plug events). I am not exactly certain what got most USB peripherals working again and why the whole USB system locked up two days ago, but so far it seems that correcting the syntax of udev rules has helped prevent USB bus lockups. During boot, I still get udev-related warntings/errors about missing brackets, so it seems I need to go through all the udev rules, which I inherited when I upgraded from 9.3, with a fine tooth comb. Again, I would like to thank everybody for their help and I hope that these postings will prevent others from having the problems with USB I just had. CF