I have VMPlayer 5.0.2 running on Debian 7 with WinXP SP3 as the guest OS. When I first installed everything my removable USB devices would work fine. I would see the icon for each device in the lower right hand corner and XP would detect then properly. After restarting a few days later I am no longer able to see my USB devices in XP. They still show up fine in a lsusb listing on the Linux side. I haven't changed any settings but I did get a warning about missing USB devices when I launched VMPlayer a second time. That warning doesn't show anymore. The VM is configured to autoconnect USB devices and it has focus (unity is inactive) when I plug them in but nothing happens and nothing new is listed in the "Removable Devices" sub-menu. I tried repairing the VMWare Tools installation from within XP but it had no effect. One of the devices in question is an FTDI serial to USB converter, nothing exotic. Is there something I'm missing here? I noticed that the XP remove hardware dialog shows two USB controllers one "Universal" and the other "Enhanced" I don't know if they were both present when everything was working.
Affected devices from lsusb:
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 03eb:2104 Atmel Corp. AVR ISP mkII
Bus 005 Device 005: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 04f9:2100 Brother Industries, Ltd Card Reader Writer