USB some kind of unstable?

[Lawless]

Hi,

running several machines with gentoo on them here. One of them is a small server for printers, samba, wlan etc.
My problem - printers and wlan are devices which aren't always connected but only when they got used. So usb devices are plugged in and out quite often - now it seems to me that sometimes the whole usb gets some kind of messed up in special conditions/situations - let's say when a printer causes an error and the user disconnects and reconnects it or so (just an example).
Then the usb subsystem blocks every new connection - plugging in a device doesn't seem to create an event on the system anylonger. Not even dmesg shows an error - just nothing happens.
I do not know what could cause this so my first question is - am I alone with such a problem?
And secondly is there any posibility to restart/reset the whole usb subsystem to avoid a reboot?
All usb related things are fixed in the kernel - no modules.
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Kernel panic: I have no root and I want to scream