So I posted this ticket here a couple days back on the Windows forum. It details the symptoms of what I’m going through and the steps I had taken up to that point so I suggest that as a first read:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/new-usb-devices-plugged-in-stop-being-recognized/733ea1d9-0534-461f-9987-57dda5129698?tm=1578849420166&auth=1
It got no replies but I kept trying to isolate the problem and it turns out that ever since I unplugged my My Passport external drive, absolutely all of the issues have stopped occurring (aside from the Audio Bus issue, but it at least has not forced me to reboot to fix it since) and I’ve been plugging USB devices and playing games without a hitch since, which seems to start seriously pointing to the external drive being the problem.
I remember turning off the helper programs that came with the drive when I started having issues with it to see if that would help (it didn’t).
Anyone know of this issue and a solution that might be floating around? Thanks!
In the meantime my external drive will act as a fancy paper weight.
P.S. I’d post my dxdiag log but apparently new users can’t upload files. :<
