OSCAM and Argolis Smartrader 2+ problems

Our cable operator uses Conax chip-cards for encryption of some channels. I bought an Argolis Smartreader 2+ as that seemed to be one that most people had luck with. Last night though, it stopped working. The supplied smartreader2tool claimed it could not find any readers even if dmesg showed that it was there. Unplugging and replugging did not help.

Only thing that I know had changed was that I enabled remote access (vnc), so I turned that off again.

It appears that it freezes if I reboot the machine with the reader plugged in. If I unplug and plug it in again, it works.

The reader itself is based on an FTDI-bridge (chipcards are serial devices) and looks like /dev/ttyUSB0.

Any ideas and is there a way to just reinit some USB-ports? My tuners, all three of them are USB and I’d rather not bounce them when recording?