I have a customer with a Windows Server 2003 Standard installation that is using external USB hard drives as backup media, the backup software is Symantec Backup Exec 2010. Several months ago, they began having an issue where whenever a drive was plugged in to the server, it would cause various issues on the server, including an overall lack of responsiveness, inability to access the Management MMC and issues with shutting down. The system will not allow you to stop the USB device through the system tray icon and the only way to restore normal functionality is to power the server off and back on. If the USB drive is connected at power up, the system will recognize it and appears to interact normally with it, as well as behaving normally in general. If you remove it and attempt to add a different drive, the above behavior happens again, which is a major issue, since they change these drives out daily for the next backup. I should point out that these drives have been used to backup this server since day 1, back in 2005.
The server in question has all the most recent drivers and updates. I have tried different external hard drives on this server (drives from two different manufacturers), different cables, different power sources, various OS tweaks of the USB system, added a 3rd party USB interface card and the problem persists. Yet I can take one of these drives to a Windows XP workstation and connect/disconnect it with no unusual behavior caused.
If anyone has any suggestions, I would be very interested in new ideas.