after suspend/sleep problem, USB drives won't mount?

[TomRoche]

After upgrading UP3->UP4 (i.e., upgrading to the 3.2 kernel) I'm noticing the following problem with one of my laptops. Previously, I had no problem suspending to memory (aka sleeping) the box. Now I'm noticing that

1. After a restart, the first few sleeps occur normally: screen goes black with no messages, disk stops, power LED goes from fully-on to strobe.
2. Eventually, I will try to sleep, and the screen will go black but I will briefly see (too fast to read) some messages in white text (more here about that) flash on the screen before the box sleeps.
3. After that,
   • Every time I sleep, I will see flashing messages.
   • After I resume, I will be unable to mount USB drives: the box simply will not recognize any!

Note

• the same box is also having a possibly FUSE-related problem after UP3->UP4: dunno if that might be related.
• I see this in both Cinnamon and MATE.

How to fix or debug? Currently the only workaround I've found is to restart, which annoys :-(