A new MP3 player, and evil USB problems

I bought a 1G Creative Zen Nano Plus. Which was sort of weird, because I only own about 300M of mp3s. Oh well, I am gonna rip some more.

When I stuck it into my USB port the computer did not react to it in any visible way. /var/log/syslog said things like "usb 2-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2" and "usb 2-4: device not accepting address 2, error -110". After swearing many times at the device, I figured I would try it on my other Linux (the grandmother of all the ancient laptops), and it worked like a charm. Considering that I have sever other USB devices that work with the old Linux but not the new one, I figured there must be some problem with the computer and not with the player.

Luckily for me, there is always Lasu and www.linux-usb.org. I said the magic words "rmmod ehci-hcd" and everything started working properly.