USB stick problem

[scott at MIT.EDU (Scott R Ehrlich)]

I have a USB "thumb" drive that used to work fine (and is fairly new).   One
day, it just stopped working properly on a Windows machine.   I tried to remove
the Windows XP USB device drivers, but that didn't help.   I tried the stick on
a couple other Windows machines, including a newly installed, and some worked,
while others didn't.

On a newly installed Linux box, I get:

Jul 12 08:47:07 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using
uhci_hcd and address 2
Jul 12 08:47:07 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Jul 12 08:47:08 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Jul 12 08:47:08 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using
uhci_hcd and address 3
Jul 12 08:47:08 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Jul 12 08:47:08 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Jul 12 08:47:08 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using
uhci_hcd and address 4
Jul 12 08:47:09 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: device not accepting address 4, error
-71
Jul 12 08:47:09 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using
uhci_hcd and address 5
Jul 12 08:47:09 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: device not accepting address 5, error
-71

So the problem is not OS or machine-specific, and it does work on some machines,
but not all.

The above types of errors appear in a multitude of Google searches.

Any insights?

Thanks.

Scott