I have a older numeric usb keypad. That I have had for years the circuit board is stamped 2002. So it is most likely a usb 1.X device. On my laptop it works in the USB 3 port but not in the two USB 2 ports. On my windows desktop tower it works in none of the ports. Now here is the weird thing if I plug the keypad into a old usb hub it works correctly in every port. I know this is not a OpenSUSE problem as both windows 7 & opensuse show the exact same behavior. Does anybody have a theory as to what would be causing this. It works fine on my old winXP machine and another machine running mandriva 2010.
Well just a theory 
USB hardware is not always 100% backward compatible. In fact very early USB 1.0 devices often had problem working on any arbitrary USB port. So it is just hardware incompatibility. The timing is off or the handshake is sloppy.