Interesting to see you bring this back to IRC today.  I was trying to help 
"cptnunderpants" on Saturday, and had to bail.  In the interim I forgot his 
actual identity, but I know he has been on the list, so I thought I'd post 
some here.

I think at this stage we need to wait for him to plug the stuff in and reboot, 
then see what happens.  He seemed to have the right modules loaded, but 
hotplug wasn't running when he plugged USB stuff in.

By the way, hotplug also handles PCMCIA cards, possibly FireWire too.