dell lattitude usb problem

[eeezzzeee]

hey guys,
i know this isn't a mint problem but i am hoping someone out there could share some expert tutilage with me. A friend of mine has an older dell laptop that i set up xubuntu for. everything was working great with it, today she called me and said after she ran the updates the usb's stopped being recognized. i took a look at it and googled everything i could think of but nothing seemed to fix it. i tried restarting the computer with a jumpdrive in it with a live usb and it didn't boot... but im not sure if that is due to the age of the comptuer not supporting usb boots or the usb's not working, i don't remember testing the usb when i set up the computer. there is power running through the usb's cause my jump drive and usb mouse both lit up, but they aren't being seen by xubuntu. i am at work right now but the next thing i was going to try was to boot of a live cd when i get home tommorow and see if the live cd will see the usb's. any thoughts or experience with this out there?
thanks

[Husse]

Run lsmod and look for ohci and ehci (with the grep command if you prefer)
That will tell you if USB is detected and the appropriate modules are loaded

[eeezzzeee]

Thanks for the reply, I tried a bunch of different things I found on the net, but none of them worked. My fried wasn't too concerned about it so we just left it how it was.