Why do I have to reboot to use the USB ports?

[Tyrannocaster]

I've been using Linux Lite [4.0] for several months now with mostly no problems. However, there is one dealbreaker which I have been putting up with that has just gone too far. I didn't really understand the problem until yesterday, when I figured it out - although I only figured out the symptom, not the cause. I thought the USB performance was just erratic - sometimes I could copy files to a USB drive, sometimes I couldn't. Yesterday I figured out that when I can't copy to the USB drive, I have to reboot and it will work...until I remove the USB drive. From that moment, no matter what drive I stick in the USB port, the system won't let me copy anything to it.

Is there some way of re-initializing the USB port to avoid this? Obviously, this is not sustainable in a workflow context.

The machine is a HP Pavilion p6110f, if that helps.

Thanks,

Ty