I'm wondering if there's a way to restart the USB system. Something that works like /etc/init.d/network restart but for USB.

The reason is that the USB port is a bit flaky and things tend to get dropped from it if the wire is wiggled wrong. This becomes a problem when I'm using my USB speakers because the act of heartlessly yanking the sound card out while it's being used causes the whole USB system to crash. Like my mouse doesn't even work anymore.

There's got to be some way to do it because it turns out that just logging out fixes the problem. During a log out (not even shut down), both the mouse and speakers come back online. So I just want to be able to do this without actually logging out.