Here's the thing: I have a usb keyboard and usb mouse (I'd rather not, but both my ps/2 ports miraculously died), and Slackware 10. My machine would always hang on the rc.hotplug script when booting up, until I reached back and pulled out my keyboard and plugged it back in. A few seconds later everything is golden. This is, needless to say, irritating.

After trying a few things, I turned off hotplugging and just loaded the needed modules by hand. Turns out the one that's making it hang is "usb-ohci". If I don't load this I can use the keyboard, but the mouse doesn't respond. If I do load it, I have to reach back everytime and unplug and replug the keyboard in to keep it from freezing. I really don't understand what the problem is. The module is obviously trying to do something it shouldn't, and I'd be grateful if anybody could give me a hint on how to make it stop being difficult.

If your ps/2 ports died, are you sure that its not a hardware problem?

Have you tried using them with Knoppix or something similar?

Cheers
Amos

Yeah, I'm sure... they work fine in Knoppix as well as Windows. There's actually a bit more to the story as far as my PS/2 ports go: they didn't just die, I uhh *cough* tripped over the wires and it wrecked the ports up. This was at a time when my box was temporarily stored on the floor, so I guess it was inevitable.