I am having some troubles using various external hard drives and my printer, all of which I connect using USB. The majority of the time, when I connect either of these devices, my system freezes up completely after about 10 minutes. They work just fine prior to that moment. I've also not noticed any problems using a USB mouse.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 and have tried using a newer kernel (a 2.6.36 Maverick kernel from the kernel ppa, as opposed to the default 2.6.35 one) to no avail. I'm using a Dell Studio XPS 16 (M1647) which is a sort of newish laptop and so my guess is this is probably some kind of driver bug.

Is there anyway to debug these sorts of issues? I've looked through some of my logs (/var/log/messages seemed the most useful) but haven't been able to find any kind of USB related logging nor anything interesting happening prior to the hang.