Sounds good. You can make it on an external drive too. You should be fine without the backup but you had so many issue I don't want to stir something up and not be able to easily go back.
Are you able to perform a refresh?
Does the USB program you have contain the ability to monitor USB traffic?
This may be usefull, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh451296(v=vs.85).aspx If you can watch the data from that port you can see what it does and doesn't do.
I already have an profile with TechNet from some other stuff and I never posted to there so I assumed since it auto logged me in they used the same profile. But I guess not :)
I am still waiting for a response
I looked at the WU and CBS logs haven't found anything exciting. When did you fix the task scheduler? It looks like it went out on 7/13/2014 because there was a huge spike in Windows Update Errors. It looks like it couldn't figure out if it was allowed to
do an update while on battery power had issues with an internet connection and it paused on 28 updates that ended up failing because it couldn't set a property.
What is SWUpdate? Is that a Samsung updater? It looks like something is manually trying to update but the items being updated don't need it. The last ones I say were You may want to disable it to see if things improve on your computer. There is a good chance
that it keeps updating things with drivers that don't work. Windows update doesn't always download the newest driver because it only uses ones that are best for you computer. So if knows of an issue or isn't sure it will work then it will reject it
I don't know why I didn't suggest this earlier but try cleaning the port out. IT seems like it is getting power but it can't send data correctly. It could just be a lose connection on the mother board or something, When you plug in a device does it tell
you how much power it requires in the power tab in Device Manager
You could create a driver.log to see if it is trying to install a driver but failing, however I don't think it is even getting that far
.